Laszlo Szabo, actor-director
Born on 24 March 1936 in Budapest, Laszlo Szabo went to the cinema because he didn't dare go home on the day his mother died, the year he was 11 years old, and has been going to the cinemas ever since.
He narrates his departure from Hungary and how he was received in France:
"I left Hungary in November 1956 when the Russians were there. I wanted to go to Paris. I was 20-years-old. We got a fantastic welcome. We were travelling as a group and spent the first five days in a barracks. We shared meals with the soldiers. I tried to communicate with them but I didn't speak French. I remember I had Hungarian shoes and one of them gave me brand new shoes.
A week later I was at the Cité Universitaire (university hostel). I was one of the first Hungarian refugees to be admitted. I spent six years there and I loved it. The director was like a mother to me. For a year after that I lived in a hotel and then at a friend's apartment.
I went to the drama school on Rue Blanche where I learned French. I love Molière and La Fontaine and my teacher was one of Pierre Fresnay's wives. I got 17/20 by reciting a passage by La Flèche in The Miser although I didn't understand all the words..., I understood the sentences but not all the words. And then someone took me to the set of Cousins by Claude Chabrol who said to me: “You’ll have a line to say tomorrow.” The next day I was to open the door to a room where a surprise party was taking place and say, ‘I’m sorry!’”
Chabrol then wrote to me saying: “I'll include you in my next film.” It was ‘A double tour’ (Web of Passion). I was Jean-Paul Belmondo's friend who was just starting out and who played a Hungarian called Laszlo Kovacs. I filmed with all New Wave directors: Rohmer, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Chabrol.
I mean, I owe everything to France, even my wife.”
Lazslo Szabo is one of two actors who have worked with all New Wave directors. He also appeared in Olivier Assayas' 1994 film Cold Water. Assayas was the son of Hungarian refugee Catherine de Karolyi. He also featured in Costa Gavras' The Confession, which denounces the Stalinist trials, and also in Philipp Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, based on the novel by Czechoslovakian refugee Milan Kundera, now a naturalised French citizen, which recounts the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968.
After becoming a film director, he returned to Hungary to make two feature films: David, Thomas and the Others (1985), which depicts post-war Hungary through the eyes of children, and Az ember, aki nappal aludt (The Man who Slept at Daylight) (2003).