French film director de Broca dies

French director Philippe de Broca, who worked as an assistant to Claude Chabrol and Francois Truffaut before becoming known for his own eccentric comedies, has died. He was 71.

President Jacques Chirac said French cinema had lost “one of its most talented servants” and an “imaginative and demanding” director who gave France “some of its most successful comedies.”

French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres announced the director’s death and said he was a “creator of multiple talents”.

The daily Le Parisien said he died of cancer in a Paris-region hospital on Friday night.

His most popular early films included L’homme de Rio – in English, The Man from Rio” – in 1963, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo.

There followed Le Roi de Coeur – or The King of Hearts – a 1966 anti-war film in which asylum inmates take over a village during wartime and anoint a British soldier, played by Alan Bates, as king.

After working with Chabrol and Truffaut, his first movie was Les jeux de l’amour – or The Games of Love – with Jean-Pierre Cassel, in 1959. He went to make more than 30 movies in his more than 40-year career.

His last film, Vipere au poing – or Viper in the Fist – has sold more than 1 million tickets since it hit screens in October.