Jean-Pierre Léaud
French actor
Jean-Pierre Léaud (French: [ʒɑ̃pjɛʁ le.o]; born 28 May 1944) is a French actor best known for being an important figure of the French New Wave and his portrayal of Antoine Doinel in a series of films by François Truffaut, beginning with The 400 Blows (1959). He has worked with Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Rivette, as well as other notable directors such as Jean Cocteau, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean Eustache, Catherine Breillat, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Aki Kaurismäki.
Early life
Born in Paris, Léaud made his major debut as an actor at the age of 14 as Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character based on the life events of French film director François Truffaut, in The 400 Blows. To cast the two central characters, Antoine Doinel and his partner-in-crime René Bigey, Truffaut published an announcement in France-Soir and auditioned several hundred children in September and October 1958. Jean Domarchi, a critic at Cahiers du cinéma, had earlier recommended the son of an assistant scriptwriter, Pierre Léaud, and the actress Jacqueline Pierreux. Patrick Auffay was cast as René.
Truffaut was immediately captivated by the fourteen-year-old Léaud, who had already appeared with Jean Marais in Georges Lampin's La Tour, prends garde ! (1958). He recognized traits they both shared, "for example a certain suffering with regard to the family...With, however, this fundamental difference: though we were both rebels, we hadn't expressed our rebellion in the same way. I preferred to cover up and lie.
“Jean-Pierre Léaud” enters the record as french actor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jean-Pierre, Léaud and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q295834. VIAF identifies the subject as 17407951. The Library of Congress control number is no95024394. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1959 and 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean-Pierre Léaud” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.