In France he is best known for his work for the theatre, internationally for his films La Reine Margot and Intimacy, and for his staging of the Jahrhundertring, the centenary Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in 1976.

[1] The following year he established a close artistic relationship with the leadership of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler.

The film assembled a starry cast including Edwige Feuillère, Simone Signoret, Alida Valli and Charlotte Rampling[5] "in the [Miss Blandish] role giving a performance of extraordinary intensity.

[2] The production, celebrating 100 years after Wagner's work had been performed for the first time as a cycle at the first Bayreuth Festival, became known as the Jahrhundertring (Centenary Ring).

The French team revolutionised the understanding of Wagner in Germany, as music critic Eleonore Büning wrote in her obituary in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

[9][10] Gerhard R. Koch mentioned in his obituary that the unity of direction, scene and light was new for Bayreuth and suggested a critical view on capitalism heading towards fascism.

[11] The Ring production, filmed for television in 1980,[12] initially provoked controversy,[13] but was celebrated after its final performance in 1980 with a 45-minute standing ovation.

He first considered Goethe's Faust but then directed in 1981 Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt for Villeurbane and Paris, aiming at "an incandescence of theatrical experience, a global spectacle".

[1] Chéreau directed the first performance of the three-act version of Alban Berg's Lulu, completed by Friedrich Cerha, at the Paris Opera on 24 February 1979, again conducted by Boulez and with sets by Peduzzi, with Teresa Stratas singing the title role.

He directed Dans la solitude des champs de coton again in 1995, shown at Ivry, the Wiener Festwochen and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

[citation needed] He staged in 2011 Jon Fosse's Je suis le vent in an English version, I Am the Wind, by Simon Stephens at the Young Vic Theatre, with Tom Brooke and Jack Laskey.

He and his co-writer, Hervé Guibert, worked for six years on the scenario, which tells of a love affair between an older man involved in prostitution and a teenage boy, a dark view in the context of HIV/AIDS.

Set in the 16th century, depicting the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in France, it shows battles and the St Bartholomew's day massacre.

[citation needed] Chéreau's staging of Berg's Wozzeck was shown from 1993 to 1999 at the Théâtre du Châtelet and the Staatsoper Berlin, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, with Franz Grundheber in the title role and Waltraud Meier as Marie.

[citation needed] In 1998, he directed the film Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, a "melodramatic, sentimental and emptily wordy ... about the interplay of assorted characters on their way to the funeral of a misanthropic, bisexual minor painter (Jean-Louis Trintignant).

[3] His staging of Mozart's Così fan tutte was shown in 2005 and 2006 in Aix-en-Provence, the Opéra National de Paris and the Wiener Festwochen.

He had stayed away from the opera because he regarded it as "predominantly a musical rather than a theatrical work", but his "sombre, subtle direction – with Waltraud Meier an acutely vulnerable Isolde – was intensely moving".

[3] His last production was Elektra by Richard Strauss, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, shown at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July 2013[15][16] and scheduled for the MET's 2015–16 season.

[1] A review noted: "The clichés of Fascist brutality and expressionist exaggeration are astutely avoided: this is a situation that involves human beings, not caricatures, in a visually neutral environment of bare walls, windows and doors (designed by Richard Peduzzi) which is also blackly portentous in atmosphere.

[2] In 2009, Chéreau signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges, which the petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely", and that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no-one can know the effects.

The "Reason for award" noted: A natural-born artist with a clear calling, Patrice Chéreau is one of those rare examples of a person who manages to succeed in all the expressive arts.