1976). Clair also ventured into other media. In 1951 he directed his first radio production, Une larme du diable. In 1959 he directed a stage production of Musset's On ne badine pas avec l'amour, in which Gérard Philipe gave one of his last performances before his death. In 1972 he staged Gluck's Orphée for the Paris Opéra. Personal life At the end of 1924, while Clair was working on Ciné-sketch for the theatre with France Picabia, he first met a young actress, Bronja Perlmutter, who subsequently appeared in his film Le Voyage imaginaire (1926) premiered at the newly opened Studio des Ursulines. They married in 1926, and their son, Jean-François, was born in 1927. René Clair died at home on 15 March 1981, and he was buried privately at Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois. Reputation Clair's reputation as a film-maker underwent a considerable reevaluation during the course of his own lifetime: in the 1930s he was widely seen as one of France's greatest directors, alongside Renoir and Carné, but thereafter his work's artifice and detachment from the realities of life fell increasingly from favour. The avant-gardism of his first films, and especially Entr'acte, had given him a temporary notoriety, and a grounding in surrealism continued to underlie much of his comedy work. It was however the imaginative manner in which he overcame his initial scepticism about the arrival of sound which established his originality, and his first four sound films brought him international fame. Clair's years of working in the UK and USA made him still more widely known but did not show any marked development in his style or thematic concerns. It was in the post-war films that he made on his return to France that some critics have observed a new maturity and emotional depth, accompanied by a prevailing sense of melancholy but still framed by the elegance and wit that characterised his earlier work. However, in the 1950s the critics who heralded the arrival of the French New Wave, especially those associated with Cahiers du Cinéma, found Clair's work old-fashioned and academic. François Truffaut wrote harshly of him after seeing The Flame of New Orleans: "We don't follow our elders in paying the same tribute to Renoir and Clair. There is no film by Clair which matches the invention and wit of Renoir's Tire au flanc.... Clair makes films for old ladies who go to the cinema twice a year." André