Jean-Luc Godard was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement and was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the postwar era.

His work “revolutionized the motion picture form” through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork, according to AllMovie.

Jean-Luc Godard parents: Odile Godard, Paul Godard

Odile and Paul Godard, Swiss physician, were his rich parents.

His mother was the daughter of Julien Monod, the founder of the Banque Paribas. She was the great-granddaughter of Adolphe Monod, a theologian. Other relatives on his mother’s side include musician Jacques-Louis Monod, naturalist Théodore Monod, preacher Frédéric Monod, and former Prime Minister and subsequently President of Peru Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.

Jean-father Luc’s relocated the family to Switzerland four years after his birth. Godard was in France during the onset of WWII and returned to Switzerland with difficulty. He spent most of the war in Switzerland, however, he and his family made secret journeys to his grandfather’s estate on the French side.

In a 2002 Sight & Sound survey, Godard was chosen third among the best ten directors of all time by the critics (which was put together by assembling the directors of the individual films for which the critics voted). He is said to have “created one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century,” and his work has “challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism’s vocabulary.” He was awarded an Academy Honorary Award in 2010 but did not attend the ceremony.

He married actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky twice, both of whom appeared in numerous of his films. His work with Karina has resulted in critically praised films such as Vivre.