Rene Clement; Acclaimed Director of French Films

PARIS —  French award-winning filmmaker Rene Clement--best known for his action-packed account of the liberation of Paris, “Is Paris Burning?”--has died at 82.

Clement died Sunday, one day short of his 83rd birthday, the Fine Arts Academy announced.

A gifted director inspired by war-torn France, Clement’s finest achievements also included “The Battle of the Rails” in 1945, a quasi-documentary about the French Resistance movement and its successful sabotage of the national railways during World War II.

In 1966 he directed a star-heavy cast in “Is Paris Burning?” The pseudo-documentary re-created the French capital’s liberation and the Nazis’ attempt to destroy it.

The film starred Charles Boyer, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Leslie Caron, Alain Delon, Kirk Douglas, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Robert Stack and Orson Welles. Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay from the Larry Collins-Dominique Lapierre bestseller.

“Twenty years after 1918, World War I was very far away. But 20 years after World War II seems almost like yesterday,” Clement told The Times as he was filming the epic in Paris in 1965. French bystanders to the filmmaking expressed fear, for example, at the sight of actors in Nazi uniforms.

Critics said Clement’s most successful film was “Forbidden Games” in 1952, the poignant yet unsentimental tale of a child adrift in France during the war. It won the Oscar for best foreign film.

In 1984, Clement earned a Cesar, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for his life’s work.

Clement began his career making short subjects and documentaries, assisting Jean Cocteau in “Beauty and the Beast” in 1946.

Other films include “Purple Noon” (1957), “Rider on the Rain” (1970) and the thriller “The Cursed” (1947).