Jean-Luc Godard: Age, family, net worth and filmography

French avant-garde filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard passed away on Tuesday, September 13. Considered the father of the French New Wave cinema movement, Godard was 91 years old at the time of his death. 

Godard was born on December 3, 1930, in Paris to a Franco-Swiss family. His father, Paul Godard, was of Swiss descent and lived in France and worked as a physician. His mother Odile –  came from a wealthy family and belonged among the elites of France. She was the daughter of Julien Monod, who was one of the founders of the now-international commercial banking group BNP Paribas.

Also read: Jean-Luc Godard: 5 best movie quotes

At the age of four, Godard moved to Switzerland along with his parents. When World War II broke out, young Godard kept moving between Switzerland and France along with his family. 

Godard married his long-time female lead Anna Karina- the French actor, in 1961. The marriage lasted for six years till 1967. Following the separation from Karina, he married Anne Wiazemsky in 1967. She was also an actor whom Godard casted frequently in his films. His second marriage, which was also his last, lasted till 1979. 

Since then, the filmmaker was in a partnership with Anne-Marie Miéville, a multimedia artist, till his death on Tuesday. 

Also read: Jean-Luc Godard best quotes on cinema

In his illustrious career, the filmmaker has made close to 30 films and all of them are considered classics. The most famous of them are Breathless (1959), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Masculin Feminin (1966), Alphaville (1965), and Bande À Part (1964). He has been part of several collaborations with his contemporaries, while many of the films he made as part of the radical Collective Dziga Vertov are as yet unavailable.

Talking about his auteur, the filmmaker had once said, “Through most of my career, I’ve made a decent living making movies no one wants to see”. However, at the time of his death, the filmmaker reportedly had a net worth of $275 million.