Career
Clément directed numerous short films during the 1930s and early 1940s. He was also Jean Cocteau's technical director on Beauty and the Beast (1946). Almost ten years passed before Clément directed a feature but his French Resistance film, La Bataille du rail (1945), gained much critical and commercial success. At the inaugural Cannes Film Festival, Clément was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won the Best Director Award. It was the first of five prizes (from 10 total nominations) Clément would receive at the festival. He was a member of the feature film jury at the 1964 festival. As of 2026, Clément remains the most-awarded French filmmaker at the festival.
From there, Clément became one of his country's most successful and respected directors, garnering numerous awards including two films that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the first in 1950 for The Walls of Malapaga (Au-delà des grilles) and the second time two years later for Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits). He launched the career of Alain Delon with his 1960 thriller Purple Noon, based on Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. Clément had international success with several films, but his star-studded 1966 epic Is Paris Burning?, written by Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola, was a costly box office failure.
He began directing Play Dirty (a.k.a. Written in the Sand), but quit early in production due to disputes with the film's producer, Harry Saltzman. He directed the thriller Joy House (1964), with Delon and Jane Fonda.
In 1973 he was a member of the jury at the 8th Moscow International Film Festival. Clément continued to make a few films until his retirement in 1975, including an international success with Rider on the Rain that starred Charles Bronson and Marlène Jobert. In 1984 the French motion picture industry honored his lifetime contribution to film with a special César Award.
Clement was a founding member and a President of the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in 1968. He was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1985, and served as its president in 1990.
