Danièle Thompson

Origins and early life

Danièle Thompson was born in Monaco on 3 January 1942, the daughter of the director Gérard Oury, born Max-Gérard Houry Tannenbaum into a Jewish family, and of the actress Jacqueline Roma; the site records her through that named Jewish father, and this fiche states plainly that her mother was not Jewish and that hers is a descent case, not an affiliation one.

Work and career

She began writing at twenty-four, with her father, and their partnership produced the biggest comedies in the history of French cinema: La Grande Vadrouille in 1966, which held the national box-office record for more than thirty years, Le Cerveau, La Folie des grandeurs, and in 1973 Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob, in which Louis de Funès plays a bigoted French businessman forced to disguise himself as a Hasidic rabbi from New York and finds himself carried through the rue des Rosiers on the shoulders of a Jewish neighbourhood.

She then wrote Cousin, cousine, nominated for the Academy Award for best original screenplay in 1977, and worked on La Boum, La Reine Margot and Belphégor. She turned director in 1999 with La Bûche and went on to make Jet Lag, Avenue Montaigne and Cézanne et moi. Her son Christopher Thompson is an actor and her frequent co-writer.