Passion collides with bourgeois values in the films of Claude Chabrol, the founder of French new wave cinema. Born June 24, 1930, in Paris, Chabrol began his career with 1958's Le Beau Serge, which he modeled after Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt.

Thrillers would become Chabrol's hallmark, and he's known for the distanced objectivity with which he approached his subjects. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the films starring his wife, Stephane Audran -- beginning with 1968's Les Biches and continuing with films such as La Femme Infidele and Le Boucher

In 1978, Chabrol cast Isabelle Huppert as the title character in Violette Noziere, the story of a teenage girl convicted of patricide. Huppert received a Cannes Film Festival award for the role, and the pair went on to make many films together, including two of Chabrol's greatest: Madame Bovary and the Cesar-nominated La Ceremonie.