Biography
Marcel Ophüls (also credited as Marcel Wall) was a German-French and American documentary filmmaker. Born in Frankfurt am Main on 1 November 1927, he was the son of director Max Ophüls. His family fled Nazi Germany in 1933, settling first in France and then the United States in 1941. He studied at Occidental College and the University of California, Berkeley, and later became a naturalised French citizen.
Ophüls began his career as an assistant director on films including his father's Lola Montès (1955) and John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952). He directed an episode of Love at Twenty (1962) and turned to documentaries in the late 1960s. He is best known for The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) and Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), the latter of which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Ophüls died on 24 May 2025 in Lucq-de-Béarn, France.
