Costa-Gavras (born February 12, 1933, Loutra-Iraias, Greece) is a Greek-born naturalized French motion-picture director noted for films that have been both political arguments and entertainments (usually as mysteries or thrillers).
The son of a Russian-born father and a Greek mother, Costa-Gavras left Athens in 1952 to go to Paris, where he enrolled in the Sorbonne. After taking a degree in literature with the intention of becoming a writer, he followed another long-held ambition—to make films—and entered the Institute of Higher Cinematographic Studies (Institut des Haut Études Cinématographiques). He became an assistant to such filmmakers as Yves Allégret, René Clair, René Clément, and Jacques Demy.
Costa-Gavras’s first film, Compartiment tueurs (1965; The Sleeping Car Murders), was a detective thriller. His second, 1 homme de trop (1967; “One Man Too Many”; Shock Troops), a World War II drama, had good reviews, but it was his next film, Z (1969), a powerfully dramatic description of political assassination in Greece, that brought him international acclaim. Z won the Academy Award for best foreign film, and Costa-Gavras earned an Oscar nomination for best director. It was followed by L’Aveu (1970; The Confession), about a communist government minister persecuted for supposed disloyalty by party members in an eastern European police state, and then by État de siège (1972; State of Siege), which centers on an American adviser to the Uruguayan military regime who is kidnapped by revolutionaries.
Costa-Gavras and screenwriter Donald E. Stewart won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Missing (1982), a film about the desaparecidos (“disappeared persons”) in Chile in the aftermath of the military coup d’état of September 1973. The film, which starred Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, also won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival. Other successful films include Betrayed (1988), concerning the rise of a white supremacist group in America’s heartland; and Music Box (1989), on the prosecution of a Nazi war criminal in the United States.
In 1997 Costa-Gavras directed Mad City, which starred John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman and focuses on the power of television news. Costa-Gavras cowrote and directed Amen. (2002), a war drama that centers on a German soldier who notifies leaders in the Roman Catholic Church about the killings inside Nazi concentration camps, and Le Couperet (2005; The Axe), about a frustrated unemployed man who decides to kill the other people competing against him for a job.
His later credits include Eden à l’Ouest (2009; Eden Is West), a drama about undocumented immigrants, Le Capital (2012; Capital), which explores corporate corruption and greed, and Adults in the Room (2019), which examines Greece’s debt crisis of 2015.
Although Costa-Gavras’s films are often very political, they appeal not only to intellectuals but also to a wide film-going public intrigued by their suspense and well-orchestrated plots.