The French romantic comedy, Alexandre le Bienheureux (Happy Alexandre, 1964) was about a man, played by Philippe Noiret, who, after the death of his wife, decides to lock himself up in his house with his dog and stay in bed all day. After two months, he gets up and then decides to live life as a holiday. Like the hero and the film, its director Yves Robert, who has died aged 81, was likeable, leisurely, hedonistic and unambitious.
Actor-turned-director Robert, a tall man with curly hair and a walrus moustache, was much loved in France, particularly for the films he made with children. One of his biggest hits was his fifth feature, The War of the Buttons (1962) in which two gangs of small boys battle daily in a sandpit between their two villages, taking prisoners whose belts, braces and buttons are cut off. One gang surprises the other by going into battle naked. Satirical and funny, it almost avoided the cute.
Robert's ability to get delightful performances from children was consolidated the following year with a pleasant, well-observed little film, Bebert et l'Omnibus, about a five-year-old boy who gets lost on a train and causes chaos. Towards the end of his career, Robert returned to childhood as a theme with the diptych, My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle, made back-to-back in 1990. These sunny, but perhaps slightly too sweet, films were based on Marcel Pagnol's memoirs of his own youth in turn-of-the-century Provence.
Although Robert's parents had trouble making ends meet, his childhood in the Loire valley was as happy as Pagnol's had been. "In the children's joy of living, there is a lot of me. As a little boy I was dazzled with life," he once said. From the age of 12 to 20, he worked as a typographer, and he always considered himself a member of the proletariat. In his early 20s, Robert studied mime, working in post-war Lyon, and then in cabaret and theatre in Paris. But he was more attracted to the cinema. "Chaplin was my Molière," he liked to explain.
In 1951, Robert played on stage opposite Danièle Delorme in Jean Anouilh's The Lark. The couple formed a long-lasting personal and professional relationship, and married in 1956. They set up a production company in 1961, and Delorme appeared in many of Robert's films.
He began in films in small parts in Marcel Carné's Juliette or the Key of Dreams (1951) and in René Clair's Les Grandes Manoeuvres (1955), and later took an important role in Clair's The Green Mare (1959) as a jealous neighbour. At the same time, he directed a few films, one of which, Ni Vu, Ni Connu (1958), starred France's popular comedian Louis de Funes. After the huge success of The War of the Buttons (which was remade in Ireland in 1994), Robert gave less time to acting. His last major role was as the working-class father of a drug-trafficking son in Claude Sautet's The Bad Son (1980).
Two of his other box-office hits were lamely remade in Hollywood. The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe (1972), a spy spoof which used the physical comedy skills of Pierre Richard, became The Man With One Red Shoe (1985) with Tom Hanks, and Pardon Mon Affaire (1976), a sexy farce with Jean Rochefort, was reprised as The Woman In Red (1984). Though Hollywood sucked out the heart of the original films, it did at least recognise their popularity.
Salut L'Artiste (1973) was an affectionate but sentimentalised look at acting, its approach balanced by casting Rochefort as a sardonic actor alongside the bit part player of Marcello Mastroianni. We Will All Meet in Paradise (1977) reassembled the cast of now middle-aged adolescents from Pardon Mon Affaire - Rochefort, Claude Brasseur, Guy Bedos; in Courage Fuyons (Courage, Let's Run, 1979), Robert had his favourite actor Rochefort play an insignificant chemist, involuntarily involved in the student riots of 1968, who ends up getting Catherine Deneuve. It was always difficult not to succumb to Robert's old-fashioned optimism and tenderness.
He is survived by Danièle Delorme, and two children from his first marriage.
· Yves Robert, actor and film director; born June 19 1920; died May 10, 2002.