Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz dead at 70

PARIS -- Raoul Ruiz, the Chilean-born filmmaker who made more than 100 films in his teeming, international career, has died. He was 70.

A favorite of cinephiles, Ruiz rebelled against the conventions of moviemaking in an extensive, varied body of work that didn't result in a widely known masterpiece, but left behind a vast, labyrinthine collection of experiments, curiosities and innovations.

Ruiz died Friday at Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris following complications from a pulmonary infection, said Francois Margolin, a producer of several films by the director. Ruiz had lived in Paris since fleeing Chile in 1973 to escape the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

An avid reader, his filmography is lined with literary adaptations, including versions of works by Franz Kafka ("The Penal Colony," 1970), Nathaniel Hawthorne ("Three Lives and Only One Death," 1996, starring Marcello Mastroianni), Pedro Calderon ("Life Is a Dream," 1987), Shakespeare ("Richard III," 1986) and Marcel Proust in "Time Regained" (1999), perhaps Ruiz's best-regarded film.

Ruiz's sprawling 4 1/2-hour "Mysteries of Lisbon," based on the 19th century novella by Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco, was released in New York and Los Angeles earlier this month. The film has drawn excellent reviews and in December was awarded the Louis Delluc Prize for best French film of the year.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy described Ruiz as a man of "immense erudition and infinite curiosity" and a "worthy son of the Enlightenment."

Born July 25, 1941, in Puerto Montt, Chile, to a middle-class family and the son of a ship captain, Ruiz studied law and theology at the University of Chile before a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1962 afforded him the opportunity to devote himself to writing.

He wrote a huge quantity of plays before he was 20 years old (he boasted that it was more than 100 plays) and worked as a writer on TV novelas. His first feature film was 1968's "Three Sad Tigers."

Later in Europe, he would continue to work in French television. He also taught film at Harvard and served as the co-director of the Maison de Culture in Le Havre, France, where he was able to produce his own films and those of others.