Legendary German-born French filmmaker, Marcel Ophuls, breathed his last at 97 in France.
The Sorrow and the Pity filmmaker peacefully died at his residence in South France earlier this week.
Ophuls' grandson, Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, confirmed the somber update with The Hollywood Reporter that his grandfather passed away.
The Banana Peel director gained popularity when he earned his first Academy Award for his 4-hour, 27-minute documentary, Hotel Terminus, which he launched in 1988.
The documentary examined the life of the notorious Klaus Barbie, convicted in Bolivia of his Nazi war crimes in 1987.
The deceased artist spent most of his life compiling more than 60 hours of footage that was eventually boiled down to that 4-hour, 11-minute film.
Marcel Ophuls' prominent work:
Marcel Ophuls was best known for his work in the war documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity, which he released in 1971, which explored the reality of Nazi occupation in the small industrial French city of Clermont-Ferrand.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker was born on November 1st, 1927, in Frankfurt, Germany, Ophuls, and his family fled their home in 1933, then escaped from Paris in 1940 when the Nazis invaded that city. They finally settled in Los Angeles in 1941.
Marcel Ophuls began his career in the film industry as an assistant to leading directors like John Huston and Anatole Litvak in 1952.
