His other notable films include Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1962), The Soft Skin (1964), Two English Girls (1971) and The Last Metro (1980).

He played the doctor in The Wild Child (1970), the director of the film-within-the-film in Day For Night and the scientist in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

He wrote Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966), a book-length interview with his hero Alfred Hitchcock which tied for second on Sight and Sound's list of the greatest books on film.

David Thomson writes that "for many people who love film Truffaut will always seem like the most accessible and engaging crest of the New Wave.

[8] Truffaut's biological father's identity is unknown, but a private detective agency in 1968 revealed that its inquiry into the matter led to a Roland Levy, a Jewish dentist from Bayonne.

[11] After starting his own film club in 1948, Truffaut met André Bazin, who had a great effect on his professional and personal life.

[14] In 1954, Truffaut wrote an article in Cahiers du cinéma, "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français" ("A Certain Trend of French Cinema"),[10] in which he attacked the state of French films, lambasting certain screenwriters and producers, and listing eight directors he considered incapable of devising the kinds of "vile" and "grotesque" characters and storylines he called characteristic of the mainstream French film industry: Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tati and Roger Leenhardt.

The article caused a storm of controversy and landed Truffaut an offer to write for the nationally circulated, more widely read cultural weekly Arts-Lettres-Spectacles.

After seeing Orson Welles's Touch of Evil at the Expo 58, Truffaut made his directorial debut with The 400 Blows (1959), which received considerable critical and commercial acclaim.

He was registered as "a child born to an unknown father" in hospital records and looked after by a nurse for an extended period of time.

The 400 Blows marked the beginning of the French New Wave movement, led by such directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette.

Thomson writes that The 400 Blows "securely tied the new films to Renoir, Vigo, and the French tradition of location shooting, flowing camera, and offhand lyricism.

"[6] Time included it on its list of the one hundred greatest films since the magazine's founding, with Richard Schickel writing: "Partly autobiographical, both realistic and gently experimental in manner, it tells the story of a mischievous boy flirting with full-scale delinquency.

[6] Following the success of The 400 Blows, Truffaut featured disjunctive editing and seemingly random voiceovers in his next film, Shoot the Piano Player (1960), starring Charles Aznavour.

[6] Truffaut directed Jules and Jim (1962), the story of a ménage à trois starring Oskar Werner, Henri Serre and Jeanne Moreau.

Truffaut does not use the screen for messages or special pleading or to sell sex for money; he uses the film medium to express his love and knowledge of life as completely as he can.

In Jules et Jim, Truffaut formed his most fruitful collaboration, with the novelist Henri-Pierre Roché, author of Les Deux Anglaises and of a situation dear to Truffaut—the passionate triangle in which three people are trapped, all in love with all, all reluctant to hurt the others.

"[6] In 1963, Truffaut was approached to direct Bonnie and Clyde, with a treatment written by Esquire journalists David Newman and Robert Benton intended to introduce the French New Wave to Hollywood.

The Bride Wore Black (1968), a brutal tale of revenge, is a stylish homage to the films of Hitchcock, once again starring Moreau.

"[15] In 1975, Truffaut gained more notoriety with The Story of Adèle H.; Isabelle Adjani in the title role earned a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actress.

It was a box-office flop, so he made Love on the Run (1979) starring Léaud and Jade as the final movie of the Doinel Cycle.

It deals with numerous Hitchcockian themes, such as private guilt versus public innocence, a woman investigating a murder and anonymous locations.

Many filmmakers admire Truffaut, and homages to his work have appeared in films such as Almost Famous, Face and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and in Haruki Murakami's novel Kafka on the Shore.

That theory, created by Bazin and his disciples (Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Rohmer, Malle), declared that the director was the true author of a film—not the studio, the screenwriter, the star, the genre.

[23]Truffaut expressed his admiration for filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini and Alfred Hitchcock.

He never tried to have a style, and if you know his work—which is very comprehensive, since he dealt with all sorts of subjects—when you get stuck, especially as a young filmmaker, you can think of how Renoir would have handled the situation, and you generally find a solution".

[27] In 1973, Godard wrote Truffaut a lengthy and raucous private letter peppered with accusations and insinuations, several times stating that as a filmmaker "you're a liar" and that his latest film (Day for Night) had been unsatisfying, lying and evasive: "You're a liar, because the scene between you and Jacqueline Bisset last week at Francis [a Paris restaurant] isn't included in your movie, and one also can't help wondering why the director is the only guy who isn't sleeping around in Day for Night" (Truffaut directed the film, wrote it and played the role of the director).

[28] Truffaut replied with an angry 20-page letter in which he accused Godard of being a radical-chic hypocrite, a man who believed everyone to be "equal" in theory only.

[33][34] In July 1983, following his first stroke and being diagnosed with a brain tumour,[35] Truffaut rented France Gall's and Michel Berger's house outside Honfleur, Normandy.

He was expected to attend his friend Miloš Forman's Amadeus premiere[36] when he died on 21 October 1984, aged 52, at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine in France.