Marcel Ophüls

Marcel Ophüls had a peripatetic childhood as the son of director Max Ophüls. He attended Hollywood High School while his father worked for the studios during the 1940s. He served with the U.S. army at the end of World War II. When the Ophüls family returned to Paris in 1950, Marcel became an assistant to Julien Duvivier and Anatole Litvak, and worked on John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952) and his father’s Lola Montès (1955). Ophüls also worked in television news reporting and made his most famous film, a two-part documentary examination of France under the Nazi Occupation, The Sorrow and the Pity, over a period of years, releasing it in 1969. A Sense of Loss (1972) looked at Northern Ireland, while The Memory of Justice (1973) compared U.S. policy in Vietnam and the atrocities of the Nazis. Ophüls turned to university lecturing and in the mid-1970s, began producing documentaries for CBS-TV and ABC-TV. He won an Academy Award for his 1988 documentary Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie.