Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jean-Pierre Melville was a French filmmaker born on the 20th of October 1917 and died on the 2nd of August 1973. He is considered a spiritual godfather of the French New Wave and one of the first fully independent French directors to achieve both commercial and critical success. Roger Ebert called him one of the greatest directors.
Jean-Pierre Grumbach adopted the name Melville as a nom de guerre during the French Resistance in World War II, choosing it as a tribute to his favorite American author, Herman Melville. He kept it as his professional name after the war ended.
Melville is best known for his crime dramas Bob le flambeur (1956), Le Doulos (1962), Le Samourai (1967), and Le Cercle Rouge (1970), as well as his war films Le Silence de la mer (1949) and Army of Shadows (1969).
Melville was one of the first French directors to use real locations regularly and to work as a fully independent filmmaker, demonstrating that films could be made outside the studio system. When Jean-Luc Godard struggled to edit Breathless, Melville advised him to cut directly to the best parts of each shot, which led to the film's famous jump cuts.
Melville influenced a wide range of filmmakers including Michael Mann, John Woo, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Walter Hill, Johnnie To, Takeshi Kitano, John Frankenheimer, Nicolas Winding Refn, Jim Jarmusch, and Aki Kaurismaki. John Woo called Melville "a god" and named Le Cercle rouge one of his favorite films.
Melville died on the 2nd of August 1973 while dining with writer Philippe Labro at the Hotel PLM Saint-Jacques restaurant in Paris. The cause of death has been described as either a heart attack or a ruptured aneurysm. He was 55 years old.