Marcel Ophüls (born November 1, 1927) is a documentary film maker and former actor.
He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, the son of the director Max Ophüls. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1950.
The son of director Max Ophüls, Marcel had a peripatetic childhood, which commentators have suggested facilitated his objective documentary accounts of the French national psyche. After education at Hollywood High while his father wo...
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Marcel Ophüls (born November 1, 1927) is a documentary film maker and former actor.
He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, the son of the director Max Ophüls. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1950.
The son of director Max Ophüls, Marcel had a peripatetic childhood, which commentators have suggested facilitated his objective documentary accounts of the French national psyche. After education at Hollywood High while his father worked for the studios during the 1940s, Marcel served with the US occupying forces in Japan. When the family returned to Paris in 1950 Marcel became an assistant to Julien Duvivier and Anatole Litvak, and worked on John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952) and his father’s Lola Montès (1955). Through François Truffaut, Ophüls got to direct an episode of the portmanteau film Love At Twenty (1962). There followed the commercial hit Banana Peel (1964), a detective film starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
With a slump in box-office fortunes,...
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