Danièle Thompson

Biography: life and films

Danièle Thompson is a French film director and screenwriter who, in the course of a career that spans half a century, has added her signature to many a French cinema classic. The daughter of two actors, Gérard Oury and Jacqueline Roman, she was born on 3rd January 1942, whilst her parents were living in exile in Monaco during the Nazi occupation of France. The family moved back to France after the war and the young Danièle appeared destined for a career in the law. Abandoning her studies, she later moved to live with her mother in New York and study art history, just as her father was beginning to direct his own films. Whilst in America, she married the financier Richard Thompson and had two children, Caroline and Christopher.

Danièle Thompson returned to France in the mid-1960s to assist her father on the script for what would be his most successful film, the wartime comedy La Grande vadrouille (1966). It was the beginning of a long and incredibly fruitful collaboration that saw Thompson pen all of Oury's films up until Vanille fraise (1989), including the Louis de Funès classics La Folie des grandeurs (1971) and Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973). In 1975, Thompson married the film producer Albert Koski. Around this time, she began scripting films for other directors, most notably Jean-Charles Tacchella's Cousin cousine, which received an Oscar nomination in the Best Original Screenplay category. The theme of this film - problems within the family - is one that Thompson would frequently return to, in such films as Claude Pinoteau's La Boum (1980), Elie Chouraqui's Les Marmottes (1993) and Patrice Chéreau's Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train (1998), as well as her directorial debut piece La Bûche (1999), co-written with her son Christopher Thompson.

Other notable screenwriting credits include Jacques Deray's Maladie d'amour (1987), Patrice Chéreau's La Reine Margot (1994) and Gabriel Aghion's Belle maman (1999). After the success of La Bûche (which attracted an audience in France of 1.6 million), Danièle Thompson went on to direct the lightweight comedy Décalage horaire (2002) before receiving greater acclaim for her amiable ensemble piece Fauteuils d'orchestre (2006), arguably her best directorial offering to date. Her next two comedies, Le Code a changé (2009) and Des gens qui s'embrassent (2013) were somewhat less impressive, and her subsequent biopic Cézanne et moi (2016) has met with mixed reviews despite its impressive production values.

Filmography