Returning to France after World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier years.

He was deeply affected by the horrors of war that he witnessed and gave expression to this in writing a volume of poetry called La Tête de l'homme (which remained unpublished).

[3] Having met the music-hall singer Damia and written some songs for her, Clair was persuaded by her to visit Gaumont studios in 1920 where a film was being cast and he then agreed to take on a leading role in Le Lys de la vie, directed by Loïe Fuller and Gabrielle Sorère.

[4] In 1924, with the support of the producer Henri Diamant-Berger, Clair got the opportunity to direct his own first film, Paris qui dort (The Crazy Ray), a short comic fantasy.

As the author of all of his own scripts, who also paid close attention to every aspect of the making of a film, including the editing, Clair was one of the first French film-makers to establish for himself the full role of an auteur.

Because of his limited English, he collaborated with the American dramatist Robert E. Sherwood as script-writer for his first film, The Ghost Goes West (1935), a comic fantasy about transatlantic culture clash.

[15] In May 1940, Jean Giraudoux, then Minister of Information, suggested to Clair that the film profession should concentrate its resources in the south of country in Nice and Marseille – and if necessary establish a French production centre in the United States.

It was with this last plan in mind that Clair and his family, along with Julien Duvivier, departed for America, but by the time he reached New York the project had already fallen through and he went straight on to Hollywood where several studios were interested in employing him.

[16] After more than a year's delay, his next film was I Married a Witch (1942), followed by It Happened Tomorrow (1944), both of which did respectably well, and then And Then There Were None (1945), which turned out to be an exceptional commercial success despite being perhaps the least personal of his Hollywood ventures.

[16] Clair's American exile had allowed him to develop his characteristic vein of ironical fantasy with several commercially successful films, but there was some feeling that it had been at the expense of personal control and that his output there had not matched the quality of his earlier work in France.

[25] Literary inspirations also underpinned other films: Faust for La Beauté du diable (Beauty and the Devil) (1950); and Don Juan for Les Grandes Manœuvres (1955).

In these two films and the intervening Les Belles de nuit (Beauties of the Night) (1952), the leading actor was Gérard Philipe who became a friend and a favourite performer for Clair.

[27] During the 1950s, as a new generation of French critics and film-makers emerged who were impatient of the prevailing modes of film production, Clair found himself increasingly criticised as a representative of the cinéma de qualité, a "cinema of old men"[28] dominated by nostalgia for their younger days.

[30] He occasionally returned to writing fiction (La Princesse de Chine and Jeux du hasard), but many of his publications dealt with the cinema, including reflections on his own films.

At the end of 1924, while Clair was working on Ciné-sketch for the theatre with France Picabia, he first met a young actress, Bronja Perlmutter, who subsequently appeared in his film Le Voyage imaginaire (1926) premiered at the newly opened Studio des Ursulines.

[33] Clair's reputation as a film-maker underwent a considerable reevaluation during the course of his own lifetime: in the 1930s he was widely seen as one of France's greatest directors, alongside Renoir and Carné, but thereafter his work's artifice and detachment from the realities of life fell increasingly from favour.

It was in the post-war films that he made on his return to France that some critics have observed a new maturity and emotional depth, accompanied by a prevailing sense of melancholy but still framed by the elegance and wit that characterised his earlier work.

"[36] It was also in a special number of Cahiers du Cinéma reviewing the current state of the French cinema in 1957 that Clair received one of his most positive appreciations: "A complete film author who, since the silent era, has brought to the French cinema intelligence, refinement, humour, an intellectual quality that is slightly dry but smiling and in good taste.... Whatever may follow in his rich career, he has created a cinematic world that is his own, full of rigour and not lacking in imagination, thanks to which he remains one of our greatest film-makers.