Born in Montrouge, a Paris suburb, on 23 February 1924. His father, a WW1 hero as an ace pilot, was not succesful in civil life. Young Sautet was raised by his mother and grandmother. As a teenager he was interested in literature, especially in the American one. After secondary education at state schools, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts with the intention of studying painting and sculpture. Meanwhile he painted decors for films, then had a traineeship in film editing, but with the start of the WW2 he had to abandon it. He became a member of the French Communist Party at the end of the war, but disappointed by its political discourse, he left it in 1952. His growing interest in cinema finally led him in 1948 to study for two years at IDHEC film school. During this period, he also worked as a music critic for newspaper Combat and, before entering IDHEC he ran a centre for juvenile delinquents. In 1951 Sauter made his first film, the experimental short Nous n'irons plus au bois. During the 1950s he worked as assistant director to Pierre Montazel, Guy Lefranc, Georges Franju and Jacques Becker, before directing his first feature, Bonjour Sourire in 1956. From 1959 on he also worked as TV producer. He collaborated on numerous scripts beginning with Le fauve est lâché and earned a reputation as a superior scenarist before making a name as director. His first significant achievement, the craftily handled underworld melodrama Classe tout risqué / The Big Risk (1960), was overshadowed by the activities of the younger, New Wave directors. Therefore, a second film, L'arme à gauche, did not follow until 1965 and was markedly less successful. Despite numerous scriptwriting assignments, Sauter's directing career did not really get under way until 1969 when he completed Les choses de la vie, a keenly observed study of a mid-life crisis triggered by an automobile accident, which won him Louis-Delluc Prize in 1970. Sauter has subsequently turned out a few finely observed social studies, often documenting the relations between large numbers of characters. This set the pattern for a decade of filmmaking, and by the end of the 1970s he had virtually become the French cinema's official chronicler of bourgeois life, and especially of middle-age. His impressive body of intimist romantic stories in a carefully depicted middle-class setting included César et Rosalie (1972), Vincent, François, Paul et les autres (1974), Mado (1976), and Garçon! (1983), written for Yves Montand. In Une histoire simple / A Simple Story (1978), a film Sauter developed as a gift for 40th birthday of his favorite actress, Romy Schneider, he focused on female characters for the first time, and in Un Mauvais Fils / A Bad Boy (1980) the director switched to the problems of the working classes and younger generations.