Born on 14 March 1939, in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hautsde-Seine), France. The son of the actor Bernard Blier, he entered the industry in 1960 as an assistant to director Georges Laurner and later rook the same post with John Berry, Christian-Jacques, JeanDelannoy and Denys de Patelliere. After helming short documentaries, he made his first feature-length film, the offbeat documentary Hitler? Connais Pas! / Hitler? Never Heard of Him! in 1963, at a time when the French New Wave was just beginning to broaden its stride.

For the next ten years, Blier was rejected by producers, his only spell behind the camera being on the 1967 espionage mystery, Si j'etais un espion (ou Breakdown) / If I Were a Spy (or Breakdown), starring his father Bernard as a doctor who unwittingly becomes involved in the spy business. Exasperated at his lack of success with classically structured scripts, Blier adapted his own anarchic novel, Les valseuses ("balls" in French slang), into a movie in 1973, and overnight the piece of driftwood from the New Wave generation became a leading light of the so-called Second Generation of French cineastes (that included Tavernier, Corneau, Miller and Techine). Les valseuses / Going Places, the picaresque saga of two hoodlums on the run, is essentially a road movie - a succession of variations, in which the main characters bounce off an assortment of French stereotypes, scandalizing many en route bm also finding free-thinking soulmates.

Blier's next film, Calmos / Femmes Farales is his weakest to date, seemingly an attempt to outdo Les valseuses in shock value rather than reinvent his comic view. After being vilified for the misogynism of Calmos, Blier bounced back in a very different direction with Preparez vos mouchoirs / Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, his most easily digestible film for sensitive stomachs and (surely not by coincidence) winner of the 1978 Best Foreign Film Oscar. The director’s incursion into surrealist territory, a farcical study in the psychology of murder, Buffet froid / Cold Curs, by any standards, is a total original. It is the dark odyssey of three people who calmly go about murdering people in a soulless, modern Paris. Buffet froid has the feel (if not the emotional content) of highly controlled lacer works like Trop belle pour toi. Blier has won a Cesar for the screenplay of the film.

Blier's next few movies returned to the more concrete territory of sexual morality and the director continued to offend, alienate, and entertain his audience. Both Beau Pere / Stepfacher and La femme de mon pôre / My Best Friend's Girl are variations on Blier's recurrent theme of a free, guiltless sexuality in which the men are finally found wanting. The same theme finds its best working out in No ere histoire / Our Story, a hastily written vehicle for Alain Delon (then looking for a role against type) and Nathalie Baye, with whom Blier had worked on Beau-Pere. Unfairly ignored at the time, it remains one of Blier's finest works, with dialogue that rolls off the screen and a free-flowing, semi-fantastic tone that forecasts the great trio of movies that were to follow.