Diane Kurys

Biography: life and films

Diane Kurys is a highly regarded French film director who was born in Lyon, France on 3rd December 1948. Her parents, Russian and Polish immigrants, met in a French internment camp in 1942. After they divorced in 1954, the young Diane moved to Paris with her mother and sister, where her mother ran a women's fashion boutique. She met the future filmmaker Alexandre Arcady in 1964. They spent time together in a kibbutz in Israel and had a son Yacha Kurys, who would later become a writer under the name Sacha Sperling. After studying modern literature at the Sorbonne, Kurys became a teacher before discovering a passion for acting. In the 1970s, she became a stage actress, first with the Renaud-Barrault theatre company and then the Café de la Gare. In this decade, she also made a few film appearances - she had a small role in Fellini's Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976) - and also appeared in some TV movies and series, including Les Brigades du Tigre (1975) and Commissaire Moulin (1977).

Diane Kurys's real career began in the mid-1970s when she worked with Philippe Adrien on an adaptation of the play Hôtel Baltimore (1976) for a television movie. Immediately after this she scripted her directorial debut feature, Diabolo menthe (1977), based on her autobiographical novel. This first film made her name and won the Prix Louis-Delluc in 1977. It was followed by Cocktail Molotov (1980), another autobiographical work set at the time of the student uprisings in 1968. After this, Kurys wrote and directed her best-known and most successful film, Coup de foudre (1983). A wartime drama depicting an intimate relationship between two women (superbly played by Miou-Miou and Isabelle Huppert), this was popular both in France and abroad was nominated for an Oscar (in the Best Foreign Language Film category) and four Césars.

Diane Kurys concluded her autobiographical trilogy with La Baule-les-Pins (1989), an engaging drama in which the director draws on her own painful recollection of her parents' separation. In Après l'amour (1992) and À la folie (1994), the director offers stark portraits of couples struggling to extricate themselves from a disintegrating relationship. Another fraught romance is the subject of Kurys's next film, Les Enfants du siècle (1998). A lavish period drama starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, this depicts an affair between two great French writers of the 19th century, George Sand and Alfred de Musset. For her next two films, Je reste! (2003) and L'Anniversaire (2005), Kurys made an attempt to move onto lighter territory, but comedy appeared not to be her forte and the critics were mostly unimpressed. She was back on form with her next film, Sagan (2008), a made-for-TV film on the life of the writer Françoise Sagan, magnificently portrayed by Sylvie Testud. The latter actress also starred in the director's next two films, Pour une femme (2013) and Arrête ton cinéma! (2015).

Filmography