The French film director Jean-Gabriel Albicocco has died, aged 65, in Rio de Janeiro, where he was living, forgotten and destitute. It was a tragic end to a career that started so promisingly - by the age of 30 he had made one of the French cinema's greatest successes.
Of Italian ancestry, Albicocco was born in Cannes, the son of the cinematographer Quinto Albicocco. By the age of 10, he was already proficient in the use of a ciné camera, shooting his own 8mm movies around the town. While still in his teens, he worked on documentaries for the cinématograph service of the French army. By 1957, the 21-year-old was assistant director on Jules Dassin's ambitious adaptation of the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis's novel Christ Recrucified, retitled He Who Must Die.
After directing a number of well-received shorts, Albicocco made his first feature. Following in the wake of the French new wave, it was The Girl With The Golden Eyes (La Fille Aux Yeux d'Or, 1961), about a fashion designer who falls for a young woman, whom he discovers is the lover of a female colleague. It would be hard to guess that this chic, stylish and stylised lesbian tale, excellently photographed by Albicocco's father and set in the Paris fashion houses of the early 1960s, was based on a Balzac story.
The film was a great success for the director, and for 20-year-old Marie Lafort in the title role, whom Albicocco was soon to marry. He followed it up with Le Rat d'Amérique, starring Lafort and Charles Aznavour, and it was selected for the 1963 Cannes film festival.
Then came his biggest hit of all, Le Grand Meaulnes (The Wanderer, 1966), based on Alain Fournier's popular young people's classic. In fact, Albicocco was the first person in 30 years to persuade Isabelle Rivière, who co-wrote the screenplay with him, to allow her brother's work to be filmed.
Again working with his father as cinematographer, Albicocco attempted to recreate the fairy-tale atmosphere of the poignant story of the young Augustin Meaulnes in search of a beautiful and mysterious girl and his lost adolescence. Though it was often too frenetic and flashy for its own good, the film was, nevertheless, visually impressive, and became one of France's biggest box-office successes of the year, as well as making an impact abroad.
But his extravagant style - it was noted that Albicocco rhymes with rococo - and rather sentimental approach seemed to lose favour with critics and the public, and his next two films, Le Coeur Fou (1969) and Le Petit Matin (1970), were flops. The latter was a roseate view of the occupation, and featured the celebrated stage director and actor Jean Vilar in his last role.
Thereafter, Albicocco decided to give up film-making and work behind the scenes of the industry. He founded the French Film Directors Union in 1968, and organised the directors' fortnight at Cannes. But in the early 1980s, with a certain amount of regret and bitterness, and now divorced, he suddenly went to live in Brazil.
"I no longer belong in France," he announced, although he was instrumental in forging links between the French and Brazilian cinemas. But his investment in a chain of cinemas, to counteract the influence of the torrent of Hollywood movies, led only to penury.
A few days before his death, when it was reported that he was gravely ill, a call went out in France to fellow cinéastes to help Albicocco. Sadly, it was too late.
Jean-Gabriel Albicocco, film director, born February 15 1936; died April 10 2001