Marcel L'Herbier was born in Paris on 23 April 1888[1] into a professional and intellectual family, and as he grew up he demonstrated a multi-talented disposition for sports, dancing, debating and the arts.

[4] In 1912 he met Georgette Leblanc, the companion of Maurice Maeterlinck, and under her influence he started to write plays, poetry and criticism, and made many contacts in literature and the theatre.

He went on to serve with various auxiliary units of the armed forces and towards the end of the war in 1917–1918 he was by chance transferred to the Section Cinématographique de l'Armée, where he received his first technical training in film-making.

He produced Rose-France (1918), a highly original and poetic film using many experimental camera techniques, which proved too fanciful for many but which established his reputation as a talented innovator.

After making another more commercial film for Gaumont, Le Bercail (1919), he was offered a two-year contract with the company which gave him the means to choose more ambitious projects.

He chose the novel Il fu Mattia Pascal, and was delighted when Pirandello's mistrust of filmmakers was overcome and he agreed for the first time to the filming of one of his works,.

The film Feu Mathias Pascal (1925) featured the expatriate Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine in the leading role, and it became successful with critics and the public.

The next and final Cinégraphic production (in collaboration with Société des Cinéromans) was another large-scale project, L'Argent (also 1928), an adaptation of Zola's novel of the same name, transposed from the 1860s to the then present day.

With an international cast, art deco design, and some spectacular location filming in the Paris Bourse, L'Argent was a substantial work which effectively marked the end of silent film-making for L'Herbier.

He also gathered around him a group of regular collaborators, including Claude Autant-Lara, Philippe Hériat, and Jaque Catelain (who became his lifelong friend and appeared in twenty of his films).

In addition to the technical problems presented by the heavy new sound cameras, L'Herbier was also required to make the film simultaneously in three different language versions (French, English and German) which meant that several actors had to be used in some of the roles.

The film was sufficiently successful to attract other similar offers, but L'Herbier felt the loss of his independence of action, and after making two detective films based on books by Gaston Leroux, Le Mystère de la chambre jaune [fr] (1930) and Le Parfum de la dame en noir [fr] (1931), he withdrew from film-making for two years and returned to writing.

In 1933, fearing that he was losing touch with the film business, he returned to make several more versions of stage plays, L'Épervier, Le Scandale and L'Aventurier, all of which enjoyed commercial popularity but gave little scope for the kind of cinematic invention that he sought.

L'Herbier's most successful film of the 1930s was Le Bonheur (1934), ("a miraculous conjunction of talents"[9]), adapted from a play by Henri Bernstein, with Charles Boyer and Gaby Morlay in the leading roles.

He began a court action against the producers Pathé, claiming their civil responsibility, and the eventual judgment of the case (1938) in his favour recognised for the first time in French law the right of the director to be considered as an author of his film, rather than merely as an employee of the company.

[11] After trying to revive his own production company, this time under the name Cinéphonic, to produce some short documentaries, l'Herbier tried to develop more satisfactory material for himself in a series of dramatised histories which he called "chroniques filmées".

As his career as a director for the cinema faded in the post-war years, Marcel L'Herbier transferred his energies to the relatively new and undeveloped medium of television.

He was the first established filmmaker to work in French television, and he brought to the task an evident seriousness of purpose and concern for its educational possibilities.

In this role he became almost a spokesman for the Vichy government on matters relating to the cinema,[17] contributing an article on "Cinématographe" to a quasi-official publication on the state of France and its future in 1941.

[18] In March 1941, L'Herbier was elected president of the Cinémathèque française, but his plans for major reorganisation soon brought him into conflict with its secretary and founder Henri Langlois.