Claude Berri, who has died of a stroke aged 74, was best known in Britain as the director of the 1986 diptych - Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources - based on the novels by Marcel Pagnol, but in France he was "the Godfather of French cinema", a prodigious producer and distributor. Berri himself said: "Out of my failure as an actor was born my desire to direct. Then my relative failure as a director forced me to become a producer. In order to get my films shown, I became a distributor. One had to eat, that's all."
He was born Claude Langmann in Paris, the son of Polish-Romanian Jewish parents. His father, Hirsch Langmann, who set up a fur business, was a communist who had escaped the Nazis by hiding in a cellar in Lyon during the war. (Berri's 1997 film of the Resistance, Lucie Aubrac, was set in Lyon.) The young Claude was determined not to become a furrier like his father, and dreamed of becoming a star.
At the age of 19, he became an actor, on stage (in a number of plays by François Billetdoux) and in several small film roles, notably Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes (The Girls, 1960) and Fred Zinnemann's Behold a Pale Horse (1964). His life changed when his charming 15-minute film Le Poulet, about a schoolboy who keeps a chicken, won the 1965 Oscar for best short subject. "It was the biggest surprise of my life," he said. "None of my later successes has ever given me as much joy." Berri produced it himself, having already set up Renn Productions, named after the German-born Katharina Renn, with whom he had acted in Billetdoux's Tchin-Tchin. Even at an early age, he showed the makings of an impresario by persuading his father and friends in the fur business to invest in plays and films.
Berri's first feature as a director was Le Vieil Homme et l'Enfant (The Two of Us, 1966) based on his experiences as an eight-year-old foster child of a bigoted old man (Michel Simon) during the Nazi occupation. The plot, which Berri described as "a love affair between a Jew and an antisemite", is sensitively and humorously handled.
His films continued in an autobiographical vein, most of them starring himself as a character called "Claude". The cycle could be compared to François Truffaut's use of Antoine Doinel as an alter ego, but Berri's "Claude" films were more mainstream comedies, with few artistic pretensions. Truffaut once said of him: "Claude Berri is not a cinephile director. He does not refer to existent films but to life itself." La Première Fois (The First Time, 1976) concerned teenage love, Le Pistonné (The Man with Connections, 1970) was about military service, and Le Cinéma de Papa (1970) followed a young man who has to decide whether to go into his father's fur business or go into films.
Rather less autobiographical was Sex-Shop (1972), Le Mâle du Siècle (Male of the Century, 1975) and Un Moment d'Égarement (One Wild Moment, 1977) - the latter remade as Blame It On Rio (1984) with Michael Caine - all of which explored male sexuality, blithely ignoring the tenets of good taste. Before his marriage to the Lebanese-born Anne-Marie Rassam, Berri made Mazeltov (Marry Me! Marry Me!, 1968), which created an unsentimental portrait of Jewish family life.
"I'm Jewish, it's part of myself, but I don't exploit it," he told me in an interview for The Guardian in 1993. "I'm not a practising Jew, yet I feel an emotion when I go to Israel, and I'm also pained by the Israeli-Palestine conflict. But the French side of me is stronger. My culture is French." This was demonstrated most profoundly by the two pantheistic Pagnol films, which were faithful to the author's vision of an updated classical Greek tragedy transposed to a gorgeous sun-bleached Provence. The narrative thrust, Bruno Nuytten's cinematography, and the towering performances from Gérard Depardieu, loving and indomitable as the hunchback deprived of water for his farm; Yves Montand, earthy and cunning; and Daniel Auteuil, comic and simple, turned Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources into huge international hits.
In contrast, Germinal (1993) was set in the gloomy north. Berri's 158-minute adaptation of Émile Zola's novel about the dark social and economic conditions afflicting coal miners in the north of France in the late 19th century, was said, at $30m, to be the most expensive movie made by a European company in Europe. Berri, who always gave the impression of being a liberal-minded bourgeois and shrewd businessman, declared: "I am more in Germinal than in Jean de Florette. If things had been different, I might have been struggling to make a living or to find work like the film's protagonists. The Pagnol story was a tragedy of individuals. Germinal is a film of the people. For me, the miners are a symbol of the working class. The feeling I have for the workers comes from my father, to whom the movie is dedicated."
Berri was a short, moon-faced, sad-looking, chain-smoking, hyperactive man, whose face lit up when speaking of anything he was passionate about. He had his share of tragedy. In 1995, Anne-Marie, whom he had divorced a few years earlier, killed herself. In 2002, their 33-year-old son, the actor Julien Rassam, also killed himself after having become a paraplegic following a fall from a third-floor window.
But Berri kept on producing films and helping his friends. He already had an outstanding record as a producer: among his successes were Roman Polanski's Tess (1979), Patrice Chéreau's La Reine Margot (1994), Abdellatif Kechiche's Couscous (2007) and Dany Boon's Bienvenue Chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Land of Ch'tis, 2008).
In 1988, Berri founded ARP (an association of writers, directors and producers) to defend their rights. As president of the Cinémathèque Française from 2003, he obtained enough state subsidies to modernise the buildings and hold exhibitions. Berri also had a great collection of modern paintings; many are on display in the Espace Claude Berri, Paris, a gallery he opened last year.
Berri died during the filming of Trésor (Treasure), which was to reflect his relationship with the writer Nathalie Rheims, with whom he lived for the last six years of his life.
He is survived by two sons, the producer Thomas Langmann, by Anne-Marie, and Darius Berri, by the costume designer Sylvie Gautrelet.
• Claude Berri (Claude Berel Langmann), director, screenwriter, producer and distributor, born 1 July 1934; died 12 January 2009
