PARIS -- French director Francois Truffaut, who led the revolution of France's 'new wave' in cinema and influenced America's best young moviemakers with films such as 'Day for Night' and 'Jules and Jim,' died Sunday. He was 52.
A spokeswoman for the American Hospital of Paris declined to reveal the cause of death, saying hospital doctors would release details Monday.
French television reports said Truffaut died of cancer and had been hospitalized in a coma for 10 days. Funeral arrangements were incomplete.
A film critic turned director, the handsome, soft-spoken Truffaut was the leader of the French 'new wave' film movement, the only school of French filmmaking to make a major mark on world cinema.
He was acclaimed for movies that included '400 Blows,' 'Jules and Jim' and 'Day for Night,' and was arguably the best-known French director among U.S. audiences.
Truffaut took the camera out of the studio and into the street, creating a radically new way of shooting and editing film that became his trademark and influenced filmmakers around the world.
Typical of Truffaut's 'new wave,' such films were low-budget and realistic with a rapid-fire succession of images that caught delighted audiences off guard.
The editing style was choppy, with unexpected cutaways that lent a new dimension to the narration. The films, in a style later to be known as 'author's cinema,' were made on shoestring budgets in contrast with Hollywood's extravaganzas.
The 'new wave' sparked similar movements in other countries, from Britain to Brazil.
American directors such as Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas paid homage to Truffaut's pivotal role in their works, citing the French director as a major influence.
Spielberg even put Truffaut in one of his blockbuster movies, 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind,' in which the French director portrayed a scientist who arranged a meeting between humans and extraterrestrial beings.
Truffaut began making movies shortly after his 1957 marriage to Madelaine Morgenstern, the daughter of film director Ignace Morgenstern, a main target for Truffaut's critical attacks in film reviews.
Ignace Morgenstern helped finance Truffaut's first movie, reportedly in hope the young critic would humiliate himself. Truffaut made '400 Blows' for a reported $60,000 and gained instant fame.
Truffaut, who later divorced, had two children, Laura and Eva, from his first marriage and a third daughter, Josephine, from Fanny Ardent, whom he married in 1983.
French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius sent Truffaut's widow a telegram, saying the director 'planted his genius on French cinema for 25 years and made a huge contribution to its rebirth and international influence.'
'We have lost a great figure in cinema to whom I wish to pay special homage,' Fabius said.
Truffaut's death came only hours after lesser-known 'new wave' director Pierre Kast died of an intestinal blockage while flying in a plane en route from Rome to Paris.
Kast, 63, who first drew notice as a director in 1957 with 'Un Amour de Poche' and later made 'The Suns of the Easter Islands' and his last film 'The Guerrilla,' was being transferred from a Rome hospital he entered Oct. 16 after collapsing at the home of Italian director Gian Vittorio Baldi.
Truffaut was born in Paris on Feb. 6, 1932, the son of an architect, and spent most of his life in the City of Light. He was a school dropout, an army deserter, an office worker and welder before he became a critic.
As a virulent critic writing for Paris' Cahiers du Cinema magazine, he watched and wrote about film pioneers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin. His 1967 book on Hitchcock was credited with making the portly master of mystery famous in Europe.
In 1958, Truffaut was expelled from the Cannes Film Festival for his scathing reviews. He was later to be honored at the same festival.
A year later, the 27-year-old Truffaut decided he was tired of 'putting crosses and grades and zeros on others work' and took up moviemaking himself, forging a style that contrasted starkly with the glittery, homogenized Hollywood look of the 1950s.
He launched his directing career with the revolutionary '400 Blows,' a semi-autobiographical account of a juvenile delinquent in post-World War II Paris.
The film won many prizes including the 1959 Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the top Golden Palm prize at Cannes.
The official recognition drew producers to start investing in other French young critic-directors such as Jean-Luc Goddard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer.
It later sparked interest in the experimental cinema of young German directors Rainer-Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schloendorff and Wim Wenders.
After the success of '400 Blows,' and his other early films, Truffaut began shooting with large American film companies.
From low-budget productions, the successful young director described the move as graduating to 'a game that consisted of doing what I pleased, and trying not to waste our financiers' money.'
Truffaut produced almost a film a year, including the Oscar winning 'Jules and Jim' (1961) starring Jeanne Moreau, and the documentary-style 'Wild Child' (1970).
The key to his success, he said, was not any single film but the number he made -- more than 30 -- in quick succession.
'Making another film when the last one is being screened is the best way to avoid the anxiety of how the public judges the first one,' Truffaut explained. Truffaut put much of himself in his films. '
