French film director Claude Chabrol has died at the age of 80, Paris' city hall announced Sunday, dpa reported.
The director made over 60 movies, but is most famous for a clutch of thrillers from the 1960s, such as The Unfaithful Wife and The Butcher.
His final film, Bellamy, came out last year.
Chabrol's films tended to focus around obsession and the middle classes.
He shot to prominence in the 1960s alongside a host of other French film-makers known as the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). They included Eric Rohmer, who died earlier this year, and Francois Truffaut.
Jean-Luc Godard, the most notorious of the group, is now one of the final veterans of that epoch still alive.
Chabrol's style was heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, with eerie, suspenseful thrillers that made use of techniques such as the zoom shot and sudden fades-to-black.
This proved controversial at the time, as his generation of young film-makers venerated both US directors and the concept of the auteur over traditional French film-making.
Chabrol was born on June 24, 1930 in Paris, the son of a pharmacist. He studied pharmacy and literature, before becoming a film critic for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinema (Notebooks on Cinema).
Chabrol was married three times, and has two sons.