Claude Chabrol, seen with his Golden Camera Award for lifetime achievement at the Berlinale in Berlin in February, made more than 70 films. (Markus Schreiber/Associated Press)French director Claude Chabrol, one of the founders of the New Wave movement that revolutionized filmmaking in the 1950s and '60s, died Sunday. He was 80.

Christophe Girard, who is responsible for cultural matters at Paris City Hall, announced the death on his blog. Other officials confirmed that Chabrol had died, but declined to provide details.

"With the death of Claude Chabrol, French cinema has lost one of its maestros," Prime Minister François Fillon said in a statement. Fillon praised the director for revolutionizing cinema "by looking at real experience, true life, that which is indiscreet and subtle."

A prolific director, Chabrol made more than 70 films and TV productions during his more than half-century-long career. His first movie, 1958's Le Beau Serge, won considerable critical acclaim. He was barely 30 years old at the time.Claude Chabrol and actor Michel Serrault, right, during the film Les Fantômes du chapelier in 1982. (Jean-Pierre Prevel/AFP/Getty Images)

The story of a man's return to his native village after a long absence was widely considered a sort of manifesto for the New Wave, or Nouvelle Vague movement, which included directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. All three had been critics with the influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.

Chabrol's movies focused on the French middle class, lifting the facade of bourgeois respectability to reveal hypocrisy, violence and loathing simmering just below the surface. Often suspenseful, his work drew comparisons with that of Alfred Hitchcock.

'Claude Chabrol is part of our national patrimony … for his films and also for his personality.'—Thierry Frémaux, Cannes Film Festival director

His film Les Cousins captured the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1959. The Académie française awarded Chabrol its prestigious René Clair cinematography award in 2005.

Thierry Frémaux, who runs the Cannes Film Festival, told i-Tele news channel that Chabrol "had a much more classic style" than some of the other, more experimental New Wave filmmakers.

"But in his classicism there was such an audacity, such freedom and erudition that I think — and history will tell — that his thrillers … will remain something totally unique in French cinema."

Speaking on France-Info radio, Frémaux called Chabrol's death "a real shock, because he was 80 years old but he continued to work, and the energy, feeling and joie de vivre that he always showed made you think he'd always be around."

"Claude Chabrol is part of our national patrimony," he said, "for his films and also for his personality."

'A delicious, malicious man'

Serge Toubiana, who heads the Paris Cinémathèque, told the same radio station that Chabrol "was a delicious, malicious man with an incredible intelligence.… He loved to laugh, loved jokes and made jokes, sort of masked himself through joking."French actress Isabelle Huppert with Chabrol in Berlin in 2006. She starred in several of his films including Violette Nozière, Madame Bovary and La Cérémonie. (Jochen Luebke/AFP/Getty)

Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë hailed Chabrol as "the inventor of inspired, rich and profoundly human movies. Claude Chabrol produced an immense and particularly inspired body of work that stands today as a monument of French cinema."

Chabrol worked at a fast clip, churning out a film about every year. He wrote many original scripts, but also adapted classics of French literature, including Madame Bovary (1991) and stories by Guy de Maupassant, for the cinema and for television.

Chabrol's top films included Les Biches, or Bad Girls, from 1968, and 1970's The Butcher, as well as the 2000 mystery Merci pour le chocolat, with Isabelle Huppert, one of his favourite actresses — who also starred earlier in Chabrol's Story of Women, from 1988.

Chabrol's last feature film, Bellamy, starring Gérard Depardieu, came out last year.

Chabrol was born in Paris on June 24, 1930. The son of a pharmacist, he "completely" belonged to the bourgeois milieu that would become the fodder for his films —"otherwise I wouldn't have dared" to depict it, Chabrol said in a 1987 interview.

The bourgeoisie "are always amusing and they can also be very mean, so it's just marvellous," he told Mardi cinéma television program.

As a young man, he studied literature and law before writing movie reviews in Cahiers du Cinéma. In 2004, he was awarded the European Film Prize for the body of his work.

Chabrol was married three times and had three sons.