László Szabó

László Szabó born 24 March 1936 is a Hungarian actor film director and screenwriter Since 1952 he has appeared in more than 120 films These include seven films that have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival He was born to Béla Szabó and Margit Gulyás Between 19541956 he was a student at the Budapest University of Technology during which he performed in an amateur theater group He applied to the Theater and Film Academy as an actor but was not accepted He left the country in the fall of 1956 and went to Paris Like the French new wavers he also visited Henri Langlois liberty university of film history at the Cinématheque watched the film series met and talked to the directors who presented their films and while writing in the cahiers interviewed Buster Keaton together with Jacques Rivette He and a friend dropped by on the set of Chabrol Cousins from whom he immediately received a onesentence role And in his next film Locked with the Key a longer one After that Godard gave him the role of the interrogator in The Little Soldier which was followed by other roles in more recent Godard films He is the favorite character actor of all the directors of the new wave everyone has a role for him they entrust him with strange boho characters who always have some disturbing and annoying ulterior motives He also took a liking to directing and made two newwave French films Truffaut wrote an appreciative review of the amusing film noir The White Gloves of the Devil ZigZig was played by the new waves favorite antistar actress Bernadette Lafont and a cool star Catherine Deneuve This is also where the selfconfidence and sardonic pungency of the new wavers can be felt Like all actordirectors he brought out the best in his actresses skillfully mixing dark humor and tenderness In the meantime from the end of the 1960s he appeared in Hungarian films and after many character roles he got the lead role from Zsolt KézdiKovács Miklós Dibusz the big snooty sumák organizer The nice neighbor His first and so far the only HungarianFrench direction was based on Nándor Gions novel Sortűz for a Black Buffalo and his first and so far only Hungarian direction The Man Who Slept During the Day