Marcel Ophuls, an award-winning Jewish documentary maker, died peacefully at his home in southwest France on May 24 at the age of 97, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert confirmed to The Associated Press on Monday.
A German, French and American actor and director, Ophuls was best known for feature documentaries such as “The Sorrow and the Pity” (1969), which demolished the myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis and was banned in France until 1981, and “Hôtel Terminus” (1988), a powerful portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie that won an Academy Award.
His first documentary, “Munich Or Peace In Our Time” (1967), about Neville Chamberlain’s surrender to Hitler’s territorial claims over Czechoslovakia, received international acclaim. He also made a notable documentary on how journalists cover war, entitled “The Trouble We’ve Seen” (1994).
In 2014, Ophuls began crowd-sourcing funds for an unfinished film to be directed by Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan titled “Unpleasant Truths,” in which he reportedly planned to link the Israeli war in Gaza that year with the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe.
The son of German-French director Maximilian Oppenheimber (better known as Max Ophuls), he was born in Frankfurt and fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1933, traveling first to France and then in 1941 to the United States, where he grew up in Hollywood.
He married Regine Ackermann, with whom he had three daughters and three grandchildren. At the 65th Berlin International Film Festival in 2015, Ophuls was awarded the Berlinale Camera for his life’s work.