Short answers, pulled from the story.
François Truffaut was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic who lived from 1932 to 1984. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave and a leading proponent of the auteur theory, which holds that a film's director is its true author.
The 400 Blows, released in 1959, was Truffaut's directorial debut and a defining film of the French New Wave. It won him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival and starred Jean-Pierre Léaud as his alter ego, Antoine Doinel.
Yes. Truffaut's Day for Night, released in 1973, earned him the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The same film also won him the BAFTA Award for Best Film.
Truffaut idolized Alfred Hitchcock and published Hitchcock/Truffaut in 1966, a book-length interview with him that tied for second on Sight and Sound's list of the greatest books on film. He paid homage to Hitchcock in films including The Bride Wore Black, Mississippi Mermaid, and his final film, Confidentially Yours.
Truffaut earned the nickname for the brutal, unforgiving reviews he wrote as a critic and editor at Cahiers du Cinéma. He was so notorious that he was the only French critic not invited to the 1958 Cannes Film Festival.
François Truffaut died on the 21st of October 1984, aged 52, at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He had suffered a stroke and been diagnosed with a brain tumour in July 1983, and he is buried in Montmartre Cemetery.
Truffaut and Godard were colleagues at Cahiers du Cinéma, but after May 1968 they split over politics, as Godard wanted a more Marxist cinema. In 1973, Godard sent Truffaut a letter calling him a liar over Day for Night, Truffaut replied with an angry twenty-page letter, and the two never spoke again.