French filmmaker and producer Claude Berri, whose works included the two-part saga on life in Provence Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, died Monday aged 74, his agent said.
A pillar of the French film industry who produced a string of successes including last year's surprise hit Bienvenue Chez les Ch'tis, Berri passed away in a Paris hospital, where he was admitted on Saturday night.
"Claude Berri left us this morning as a result of a stroke suffered Saturday night," his agency Moteur! said in a statement.
Berri, who won an Oscar for his 1963 short film Le Poulet, went on to direct the hit Provencal saga based on the novels of Marcel Pagnol, following in 1993 with a screen adaptation of Emile Zola's 19th-century novel Germinal.
Nicknamed the "godfather" of French film, Berri worked with generations of top French actors from Yves Montand to Gerard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Beart and was currently directing his 20th film, a comedy called Tresor.
He also produced a string of hit movies, from Roman Polanski's Oscar-winning film Tess, to the critically-acclaimed 2007 movie La Graine and Le Mulet (The Secret of the Grain).
Last year, he produced the record-breaking comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, which takes aim at prejudices about the bleak post-industrial north of France.
The film became the highest-grossing home-grown film in French box-office history, clocking up more than 20 million entries, and is set to be remade in Hollywood under the title Welcome to the Sticks.
The father of three children, Berri was also a leading collector of abstract art, with his own gallery in Paris, and in later years served as head of France's main film archive, the Cinematheque.
Berri had suffered a stroke once before in 2006.
Front page
RSS Feed