Jacques Tati

Jacques Tati (; born Jacques Tatischeff, ; 9 October 1907 – 5 November 1982) was a French mime, filmmaker, actor and screenwriter. In an Entertainment Weekly poll of the Greatest Movie Directors, he was voted the 46th greatest of all time (out of 50), although he directed only six feature-length films. Tati is perhaps best known for his character Monsieur Hulot, featured in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967) and Trafic (1971). Playtime ranked 23rd in the 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made. As David Bellos puts it, "Tati, from l'Ecole des facteurs to Playtime, is the epitome of what an auteur is (in film theory) supposed to be: the controlling mind behind a vision of the world on film". Family origins Tati was of Russian, Dutch, and Italian ancestry. His father, Georges-Emmanuel Tatischeff (1875-1957), was born in Paris, the son of Dmitry Tatishcheff (Дмитрий Татищев; also spelled Tatishchev), General of the Imperial Russian Army and military attaché to the Russian embassy in Paris. The Tatischeffs were a Russian noble family of patrilineal Rurikid descent. Whilst stationed in Paris, Dmitri Tatischeff married a French woman, Rose Anathalie Alinquant (Russian sources indicate that Alinquant was a circus performer and that the couple were never actually married).