Claude Lelouch is a French filmmaker, producer and writer, and in the sixties and seventies he was considered to be one of the most important and influential filmmakers in Europe and the world. His career spans nearly five decades, and he has almost fifty films to his name.

Born in Paris, France on October 30, 1937, Charles Lelouch began making films in the 1950s, billing himself as a cinereporter in his short documentaries. Through his production company, Les Films 13, he created hundreds of short musical films intended for the jukebox before filming the critically acclaimed Un homme et femme in 1966. This old-fashioned love story is famed for its innate simplicity and warmth, and it provided Charles Lelouch with a pattern for many of his later films such as Toute une vie (And Now My Love, 1974) and Une autre homme, une autre chance (Another Man, Another Chance, 1977). Un homme et femme won the Palme d'Or at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, as well as two Academy Awards, one for Best Foreign Language Film.

Claude Lelouch is widely seen as the perfect commercial director, as his films after Un homme et femme are the perfect mix of sex and crime, crime and politics, or politics and sex, these elements being ones that will guarantee an instant attraction for any story. Inasmuch as Claude Lelouch tries to recapture the acclaim he received for Un homme et femme, it is thought that his Les Uns et les autres (Within Memory, 1981) is his masterpiece. This film traces the story of four families across Europe from the 1930s to the 1960s, with the main event being the Second World War.

Charles Lelouch is also known for using improvised dialogue in his films. His latest project is entitled Le courage d'aimer (2005).