Patrice Chéreau (; 2 November 1944 – 7 October 2013) was a French opera and theatre director, filmmaker, actor and producer. In France he is best known for his work for the theatre, internationally for his films La Reine Margot and Intimacy, and for his staging of the Jahrhundertring, the centenary Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in 1976. Winner of almost twenty movie awards, including the Cannes Jury Prize and the Golden Berlin Bear, Chéreau served as president of the jury at the 2003 Cannes festival. From 1966, he was artistic director of the Public-Theatre in the Parisian suburb of Sartrouville, where in his team were stage designer Richard Peduzzi, costume designer Jacques Schmidt and lighting designer André Diot, with whom he collaborated in many later productions. From 1982, he was director of "his own stage" at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers at Nanterre where he staged plays by Jean Racine, Marivaux and Shakespeare as well as works by Jean Genet, Heiner Müller and Bernard-Marie Koltès. He accepted selected opera productions, such as: the first performance of the three-act version of Alban Berg's Lulu, completed by Friedrich Cerha, at the Paris Opera in 1979; Berg's Wozzeck at the Staatsoper Berlin in 1994; Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at La Scala in 2007; Janáček's From the House of the Dead, shown at several festivals and the Metropolitan Opera; and, as his last staging, Elektra by Richard Strauss, first performed at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July 2013. He was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in 2008. Life and career Early life Chéreau was born in Lézigné, Maine-et-Loire. His father, Jean-Baptiste Chéreau, was a painter, and his mother, Marguerite Pelicier, was a graphic designer. He attended school in Paris. Early on he was taken to the Louvre and became interested in the arts, cinema, theatre and music. At age 12, he designed stage sets for plays. He became well known to Parisian critics as director, actor, and stage manager of his high-school theatre (lycée Louis-le-Grand). At 15, he was enthusiastically celebrated as a theatre prodigy. In 1964, at the age of 19, he began directing for the professional theatre. While studying at the Sorbonne, he professionally staged Victor Hugo's L'Intervention, and subsequently dropped out of the university. 1966: Sartrouville In 1966, Chéreau was appointed artistic director of the Public-Theatre in the Parisian suburb of Sartrouville. With "idealism and inventiveness", he made the theatre a "municipal