Latest news with #FrenchResistance
Free Malaysia Today
4 days ago
- Health
- Free Malaysia Today
French scientist behind abortion pill dies aged 98
Etienne-Emile Baulieu was awarded the prestigious Lasker prize in 1989. (AFP pic) PARIS : French scientist Etienne-Emile Baulieu, the inventor of the abortion pill, died at the age of 98 at his home in Paris today, his wife told AFP. The doctor and researcher, who achieved worldwide renown for his work that led to the pill, had an eventful life that included fighting in the French resistance and becoming friends with artists such as Andy Warhol. 'His research was guided by his commitment to the progress made possible by science, his dedication to women's freedom, and his desire to enable everyone to live better, longer lives,' Baulieu's wife Simone Harari Baulieu said in a statement. French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to his life, calling him 'a beacon of courage' and 'a progressive mind who enabled women to win their freedom'. 'Few French people have changed the world to such an extent,' he added in a post on X. Baulieu's most famous discovery helped create the oral drug RU-486, also known as mifepristone, which provided a safe and inexpensive alternative to surgical abortion to millions of women across the world. For decades, he pushed governments to authorise the drug, facing fierce criticism and sometimes threats from opponents of abortion. When Wyoming became the first US state to outlaw the abortion pill in 2023, Baulieu told AFP it was 'scandalous'. Then aged 96, Baulieu said he had dedicated a large part of his life to 'increasing the freedom of women', and such bans were a step in the wrong direction. On news of his death, French equality minister Aurore Berge passed on her condolences to Baulieu's family, saying on X he was 'guided throughout his life by one requirement: human dignity'. 'Fascinated by artists' Born on Dec 12, 1926 in Strasbourg to Jewish parents, Etienne Blum was raised by his feminist mother after his father, a doctor, died. He changed his name to Emile Baulieu when he joined the French resistance against Nazi occupation at the age of 15, then later adding Etienne. After the war, he became a self-described 'doctor who does science', specialising in the field of steroid hormones. Invited to work in the US, Baulieu was noticed in 1961 by Gregory Pincus, known as the father of the contraceptive pill, who convinced him to focus on sex hormones. Back in France, Baulieu designed a way to block the effect of the hormone progesterone, which is essential for the egg to implant in the uterus after fertilisation. This led to the development of mifepristone in 1982. Dragged before the courts and demonised by US anti-abortion groups who accused him of inventing a 'death pill', Baulieu refused to back down. 'Adversity slides off him like water off a duck's back,' Simone Harari Baulieu told AFP. 'You, a Jew and a resistance fighter, you were overwhelmed with the most atrocious insults and even compared to Nazi scientists,' Macron said as he presented Baulieu with France's top honour in 2023. 'But you held on, for the love of freedom and science.' In the 1960s, literature fan Baulieu became friends with artists such as Andy Warhol. He said he was 'fascinated by artists who claim to have access to the human soul, something that will forever remain beyond the reach of scientists'. Alzheimer's, depression research Baulieu kept going into his Parisian office well into his mid-90s. 'I would be bored if I did not work anymore,' he said in 2023. His recent research has included trying to find a way to prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease, as well as a treatment for severe depression, for which clinical trials are currently underway across the world. 'There is no reason we cannot find treatments' for both illnesses, he said. Baulieu was also the first to describe how the hormone DHEA secreted from adrenal glands in 1963. He was convinced of the hormone's anti-ageing abilities, but drugs using it only had limited effects, such as in skin-firming creams. In the US, Baulieu was also awarded the prestigious Lasker prize in 1989. After his wife Yolande Compagnon died, Baulieu married Simone Harari in 2016. He leaves behind three children, eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, according to the statement released by his family.
Malay Mail
4 days ago
- Health
- Malay Mail
Abortion pill inventor Etienne-Emile Baulieu dies aged 98
PARIS, May 31 — French scientist Etienne-Emile Baulieu, the inventor of the abortion pill, died at the age of 98 at his home in Paris yesterday, his wife told AFP. The doctor and researcher, who achieved worldwide renown for his work that led to the pill, had an eventful life that included fighting in the French resistance and becoming friends with artists such as Andy Warhol. 'His research was guided by his commitment to the progress made possible by science, his dedication to women's freedom, and his desire to enable everyone to live better, longer lives,' Baulieu's wife Simone Harari Baulieu said in a statement. French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to his life, calling him 'a beacon of courage' and 'a progressive mind who enabled women to win their freedom'. 'Few French people have changed the world to such an extent,' he added in a post on X. Baulieu's most famous discovery helped create the oral drug RU-486, also known as mifepristone, which provided a safe and inexpensive alternative to surgical abortion to millions of women across the world. For decades, he pushed governments to authorise the drug, facing fierce criticism and sometimes threats from opponents of abortion. When Wyoming became the first US state to outlaw the abortion pill in 2023, Baulieu told AFP it was 'scandalous'. Then aged 96, Baulieu said he had dedicated a large part of his life to 'increasing the freedom of women,' and such bans were a step in the wrong direction. On news of his death, French Equality Minister Aurore Berge passed on her condolences to Baulieu's family, saying on X he was 'guided throughout his life by one requirement: human dignity.' 'Fascinated by artists' Born on December 12, 1926 in Strasbourg to Jewish parents, Etienne Blum was raised by his feminist mother after his father, a doctor, died. He changed his name to Emile Baulieu when he joined the French resistance against Nazi occupation at the age of 15, then later adding Etienne. After the war, he became a self-described 'doctor who does science,' specialising in the field of steroid hormones. Invited to work in the United States, Baulieu was noticed in 1961 by Gregory Pincus, known as the father of the contraceptive pill, who convinced him to focus on sex hormones. Back in France, Baulieu designed a way to block the effect of the hormone progesterone, which is essential for the egg to implant in the uterus after fertilisation. This led to the development of mifepristone in 1982. Dragged before the courts and demonised by US anti-abortion groups who accused him of inventing a 'death pill', Baulieu refused to back down. 'Adversity slides off him like water off a duck's back,' Simone Harari Baulieu told AFP. 'You, a Jew and a resistance fighter, you were overwhelmed with the most atrocious insults and even compared to Nazi scientists,' Macron said as he presented Baulieu with France's top honour in 2023. 'But you held on, for the love of freedom and science.' In the 1960s, literature fan Baulieu became friends with artists such as Andy Warhol. He said he was 'fascinated by artists who claim to have access to the human soul, something that will forever remain beyond the reach of scientists.' Alzheimer's, depression research Baulieu kept going into his Parisian office well into his mid-90s. 'I would be bored if I did not work anymore,' he said in 2023. His recent research has included trying to find a way to prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease, as well as a treatment for severe depression, for which clinical trials are currently underway across the world. 'There is no reason we cannot find treatments' for both illnesses, he said. Baulieu was also the first to describe how the hormone DHEA secreted from adrenal glands in 1963. He was convinced of the hormone's anti-ageing abilities, but drugs using it only had limited effects, such as in skin-firming creams. In the United States, Baulieu was also awarded the prestigious Lasker prize in 1989. After his wife Yolande Compagnon died, Baulieu married Simone Harari in 2016. He leaves behind three children, eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, according to the statement released by his family. — AFP
CTV News
4 days ago
- Health
- CTV News
Abortion pill inventor Etienne-Emile Baulieu dies aged 98
ARCHIVE: French scientist Professor Etienne-Emile Baulieu, creator of the DHEA molecule. (Photo by Eric Fougere/Sygma via Getty Images) French scientist Etienne-Emile Baulieu, known as the inventor of the abortion pill, died at the age of 98 at his home in Paris on Friday, his wife told AFP. The doctor and researcher, who achieved worldwide renown for his work that led to the pill, had an eventful life that included fighting in the French resistance and becoming friends with artists such as Andy Warhol. 'His research was guided by his commitment to the progress made possible by science, his dedication to women's freedom, and his desire to enable everyone to live better, longer lives,' Baulieu's wife Simone Harari Baulieu said in a statement. Baulieu's most well-known discovery helped create the oral drug RU-486, also known as mifepristone, which provided a safe and inexpensive alternative to surgical abortion to millions of women across the world. His work meant he also faced fierce criticism and sometimes threats from opponents of abortion. After Wyoming became the first US state to outlaw the use of the abortion pill in 2023, Baulieu told AFP it was 'scandalous'. Baulieu said he had dedicated a large part of his life to 'increasing the freedom of women,' and the ban was a step in the opposite direction. 'Fascinated by artists' Born on December 12, 1926 in Strasbourg to Jewish parents, Etienne Blum was raised by his feminist mother after his father, a doctor, died. He changed his name to Emile Baulieu when he joined the French resistance against Nazi occupation at the age of 15, then later adding Etienne. After the war, he became a self-described 'doctor who does science,' specialising in the field of steroid hormones. Invited to work in the United States, Baulieu was noticed in 1961 by Gregory Pincus, known as the father of the contraceptive pill, who convinced him to focus on sex hormones. Back in France, Baulieu designed a way to block the effect of the hormone progesterone, which is essential for the egg to implant in the uterus after fertilisation. This led to the development of mifepristone in 1982. In the 1960s, the literature fan had become friends with artists such as Andy Warhol. He said he was 'fascinated by artists who claim to have access to the human soul, something that will forever remain beyond the reach of scientists.' Alzheimer's, depression research Baulieu kept going into Parisian office into his mid-90s. 'I would be bored if I did not work anymore,' he said in 2023. His recent research has included trying to find a way to prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease, as well as a treatment for severe depression, for which clinical trials are currently underway across the world. French President Emmanuel Macron presented Baulieu with the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'Honneur in 2023, the top rank in France's honours system. 'You, a Jew and a resistance fighter, you were overwhelmed with the most atrocious insults and even compared to Nazi scientists,' Macron said. 'But you held on, for the love of freedom and science.' In the United States, Baulieu was also awarded the prestigious Lasker prize in 1989. The widower of Yolande Compagnon, Baulieu married Simone Harari in 2016. He leaves behind three children, eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, according to the statement released by his family.
The Advertiser
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Filmmaker who forced France to face its WWII past dies
Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during World War II, has died at 97. Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hôtel Terminus (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was The Sorrow and the Pity, that marked a turning point - not only in his career, but in how France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for over a decade. French broadcast executives said it "destroyed the myths the French still need" and did not air nationally until 1981. But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation - an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity. The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president. In the aftermath of France's liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance. Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors. The Sorrow and the Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story: the film turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance - even the town's former Nazi commander - Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation. There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions - just people speaking plainly, awkwardly, sometimes defensively. They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance but of ordinary compromise - driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism, and, at times, quiet complicity. The film revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews. How neighbours stayed silent. How teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. How many had simply got by, with resistance being the exception - not the rule. In a 2004 interview Ophuls said. "Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?" Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls and when Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again — across the rugged Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Many years later, Ophuls settled in a home overlooking those mountains. He became an American citizen and later served as a US Army GI in occupied Japan. But it was his father's towering legacy that shaped his early path. He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features his path shifted to documentaries. After The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls followed with The Memory of Justice (1976), a sweeping meditation on war crimes that examined Nuremberg but also drew uncomfortable parallels to atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In Hôtel Terminus (1988), he spent five years tracking the life of Klaus Barbie, the so-called "Butcher of Lyon", exposing not just his Nazi crimes but the role Western governments played in protecting him after the war. The film won him his Academy Award for Best Documentary but, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he attempted suicide during production. In The Troubles We've Seen (1994), he turned his camera on journalists covering the war in Bosnia, and on the media's uneasy relationship with suffering and spectacle. He was a man of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen never fully embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, but changed European cinema by telling truths others wouldn't. He is survived by his wife, Régine, their three daughters, and three grandchildren. Lifeline 13 11 14 beyondblue 1300 22 4636 Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during World War II, has died at 97. Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hôtel Terminus (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was The Sorrow and the Pity, that marked a turning point - not only in his career, but in how France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for over a decade. French broadcast executives said it "destroyed the myths the French still need" and did not air nationally until 1981. But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation - an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity. The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president. In the aftermath of France's liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance. Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors. The Sorrow and the Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story: the film turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance - even the town's former Nazi commander - Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation. There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions - just people speaking plainly, awkwardly, sometimes defensively. They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance but of ordinary compromise - driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism, and, at times, quiet complicity. The film revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews. How neighbours stayed silent. How teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. How many had simply got by, with resistance being the exception - not the rule. In a 2004 interview Ophuls said. "Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?" Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls and when Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again — across the rugged Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Many years later, Ophuls settled in a home overlooking those mountains. He became an American citizen and later served as a US Army GI in occupied Japan. But it was his father's towering legacy that shaped his early path. He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features his path shifted to documentaries. After The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls followed with The Memory of Justice (1976), a sweeping meditation on war crimes that examined Nuremberg but also drew uncomfortable parallels to atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In Hôtel Terminus (1988), he spent five years tracking the life of Klaus Barbie, the so-called "Butcher of Lyon", exposing not just his Nazi crimes but the role Western governments played in protecting him after the war. The film won him his Academy Award for Best Documentary but, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he attempted suicide during production. In The Troubles We've Seen (1994), he turned his camera on journalists covering the war in Bosnia, and on the media's uneasy relationship with suffering and spectacle. He was a man of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen never fully embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, but changed European cinema by telling truths others wouldn't. He is survived by his wife, Régine, their three daughters, and three grandchildren. Lifeline 13 11 14 beyondblue 1300 22 4636 Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during World War II, has died at 97. Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hôtel Terminus (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was The Sorrow and the Pity, that marked a turning point - not only in his career, but in how France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for over a decade. French broadcast executives said it "destroyed the myths the French still need" and did not air nationally until 1981. But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation - an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity. The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president. In the aftermath of France's liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance. Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors. The Sorrow and the Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story: the film turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance - even the town's former Nazi commander - Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation. There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions - just people speaking plainly, awkwardly, sometimes defensively. They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance but of ordinary compromise - driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism, and, at times, quiet complicity. The film revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews. How neighbours stayed silent. How teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. How many had simply got by, with resistance being the exception - not the rule. In a 2004 interview Ophuls said. "Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?" Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls and when Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again — across the rugged Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Many years later, Ophuls settled in a home overlooking those mountains. He became an American citizen and later served as a US Army GI in occupied Japan. But it was his father's towering legacy that shaped his early path. He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features his path shifted to documentaries. After The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls followed with The Memory of Justice (1976), a sweeping meditation on war crimes that examined Nuremberg but also drew uncomfortable parallels to atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In Hôtel Terminus (1988), he spent five years tracking the life of Klaus Barbie, the so-called "Butcher of Lyon", exposing not just his Nazi crimes but the role Western governments played in protecting him after the war. The film won him his Academy Award for Best Documentary but, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he attempted suicide during production. In The Troubles We've Seen (1994), he turned his camera on journalists covering the war in Bosnia, and on the media's uneasy relationship with suffering and spectacle. He was a man of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen never fully embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, but changed European cinema by telling truths others wouldn't. He is survived by his wife, Régine, their three daughters, and three grandchildren. Lifeline 13 11 14 beyondblue 1300 22 4636 Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during World War II, has died at 97. Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hôtel Terminus (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was The Sorrow and the Pity, that marked a turning point - not only in his career, but in how France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for over a decade. French broadcast executives said it "destroyed the myths the French still need" and did not air nationally until 1981. But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation - an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity. The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president. In the aftermath of France's liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance. Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors. The Sorrow and the Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story: the film turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance - even the town's former Nazi commander - Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation. There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions - just people speaking plainly, awkwardly, sometimes defensively. They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance but of ordinary compromise - driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism, and, at times, quiet complicity. The film revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews. How neighbours stayed silent. How teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. How many had simply got by, with resistance being the exception - not the rule. In a 2004 interview Ophuls said. "Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?" Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls and when Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again — across the rugged Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Many years later, Ophuls settled in a home overlooking those mountains. He became an American citizen and later served as a US Army GI in occupied Japan. But it was his father's towering legacy that shaped his early path. He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features his path shifted to documentaries. After The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls followed with The Memory of Justice (1976), a sweeping meditation on war crimes that examined Nuremberg but also drew uncomfortable parallels to atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In Hôtel Terminus (1988), he spent five years tracking the life of Klaus Barbie, the so-called "Butcher of Lyon", exposing not just his Nazi crimes but the role Western governments played in protecting him after the war. The film won him his Academy Award for Best Documentary but, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he attempted suicide during production. In The Troubles We've Seen (1994), he turned his camera on journalists covering the war in Bosnia, and on the media's uneasy relationship with suffering and spectacle. He was a man of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen never fully embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, but changed European cinema by telling truths others wouldn't. He is survived by his wife, Régine, their three daughters, and three grandchildren. Lifeline 13 11 14 beyondblue 1300 22 4636
West Australian
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- West Australian
Filmmaker who forced France to face its WWII past dies
Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during World War II, has died at 97. The German-born filmmaker, who was the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died on Saturday at his home in southwest France after watching one of his favourite films with his family, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Associated Press. Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hôtel Terminus (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was The Sorrow and the Pity, that marked a turning point - not only in his career, but in how France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for over a decade. French broadcast executives said it "destroyed the myths the French still need" and did not air nationally until 1981. But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation - an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity. The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president. In the aftermath of France's liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance. Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors. The Sorrow and the Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story: the film turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance - even the town's former Nazi commander - Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation. There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions - just people speaking plainly, awkwardly, sometimes defensively. They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance but of ordinary compromise - driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism, and, at times, quiet complicity. The film revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews. How neighbours stayed silent. How teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. How many had simply got by, with resistance being the exception - not the rule. In a 2004 interview Ophuls said. "Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?" Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls and when Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again — across the rugged Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Many years later, Ophuls settled in a home overlooking those mountains. He became an American citizen and later served as a US Army GI in occupied Japan. But it was his father's towering legacy that shaped his early path. He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features his path shifted to documentaries. After The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls followed with The Memory of Justice (1976), a sweeping meditation on war crimes that examined Nuremberg but also drew uncomfortable parallels to atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In Hôtel Terminus (1988), he spent five years tracking the life of Klaus Barbie, the so-called "Butcher of Lyon", exposing not just his Nazi crimes but the role Western governments played in protecting him after the war. The film won him his Academy Award for Best Documentary but, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he attempted suicide during production. In The Troubles We've Seen (1994), he turned his camera on journalists covering the war in Bosnia, and on the media's uneasy relationship with suffering and spectacle. He was a man of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen never fully embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, but changed European cinema by telling truths others wouldn't. He is survived by his wife, Régine, their three daughters, and three grandchildren. Lifeline 13 11 14 beyondblue 1300 22 4636
