Charles Spaak

Charles Spaak was born on May 25, 1903 in Brussels, Belgium.

In 1928 he moved to Paris and took a post as secretary to the film-maker Jacques Feyder, who then asked him to work on the adaptation of a stage play for his film Les Nouveaux Messieurs. He also worked as head of publicity for the production company Albatros.

He wrote the screenplays for Feyder's most important films of the 1930s: Le Grand Jeu, Pension Mimosas, and La Kermesse héroïque. Spaak was also in demand to work with other leading directors.

He was a writer and director, known for La Grande Illusion (1937), Before the Deluge (1954) and Le mystère Barton (1949). He was married to Janine Spaak and Claude Marcy.

In 1949 Spaak made his only venture into directing with Le Mystère Barton, but the film met with little success.

After the war Spaak worked with new directors and in a wider range styles, and he formed a particular association with André Cayatte in a series of films set against a background of the French judicial system: Justice est faite (1950), Nous sommes tous les assassins (1951), Avant le deluge (1953), and Le Dossier noir (1955).

Member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953.

Charles Spaak continued working selectively on scenarios until the early 1970s, and he died in 1975 in Vence in the South of France.

During the German occupation of France, Spaak chose to return to Paris and found work on a number of the wartime productions that were made there, including further films with Duvivier and Grémillon. (In Bertrand Tavernier's film Laissez-passer (2001) which gives a detailed picture of how film-making continued in occupied Paris, Spaak is portrayed in 1943 when he was working on a film for the Continental Films production company.).