Bertrand Tavernier, acclaimed French filmmaker, dies at 79

Bertrand Tavernier, a French filmmaker who earned international acclaim for his humanistic, character-driven style and startling versatility, died March 25 at his home in Sainte-Maxime, on the French Riviera. He was 79.

Tavernier was president of the Institut Lumière, a French film organization, which announced his death but did not give a cause.

Mentored by directors Claude Sautet and JeanPierre Melville, Tavernier worked for more than a decade as a film critic, assistant director and publicist before making his first feature, “The Clockmaker of Saint-Paul” (1974), which he adapted from a Georges Simenon novel and shot with a handheld camera in his hometown of Lyon.

“His work is an abundance of invention and generosity, and in a way the opposite of the auteur theory that he once supported, since Tavernier never forces himself or a style upon us,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 2003. “If there is a common element in his work, it is his instant sympathy for his fellow humans, his enthusiasm for their triumphs, his sharing of their disappointments.”

The winner of five César Awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars, Tavernier directed more than two dozen features and documentaries.

Tavernier was perhaps best known in the United States for “Round Midnight” (1986), about an American jazz musician — Dale Turner, played by saxophonist Dexter Gordon — who travels to Paris to play at a club and is taken in by a French fan.

René Maurice Bertrand Tavernier was born in Lyon on April 25, 1941, nearly a year after the Nazi invasion during World War II. His mother was a homemaker, and his father wrote poetry and founded the literary journal Confluences, which “became the vehicle for dozens of writers actively engaged in the resistance movement,” according to the Virginia Quarterly Review.