Bille August, the director who won the Palme d’Or twice and then disappeared into plain sight

Bille August

Photo: Foto: Jonn Leffmann / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 9, 1948 Brede, Denmark
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	Les Misérables, The House of the Spirits, Night Train to Lisbon
Awards	2 Palme d'Or · Academy Award · Golden Globe

The math is too clean. Two Palme d’Or, four years apart. One Oscar in the same window. When the Cannes jury gave Bille August the Palme d’Or for Pelle the Conqueror, they had already seen what he was capable of; when they gave it to him again for The Best Intentions, they were confirming a judgment, not discovering a talent. He shares that specific distinction — two Palmes — with a short list that includes Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Haneke, Emir Kusturica, and Lars von Trier. The list is short for a reason. And yet, ask a serious reader of European cinema to name the great directors of his generation and August’s name rarely lands first. The paradox has held for thirty years.

He was born in Brede, a small town in northern Sealand, and came to filmmaking through the camera rather than the script. After studying at the Foto- och Dokumentärskolan in Stockholm and the National Film School of Denmark, he worked through the 1970s as a cinematographer — keenly attentive to visual grammar, already building the measured, image-precise approach that would define his features. His first short, Kim G., arrived in 1978, followed the same year by the feature Honning Maane, a small-scale study of a young couple that impressed critics with its restraint and its actors.

The films that made him a Danish institution came next. Twist and Shout (1984) — the Danish title is the rather more earnest Tro, håb og kærlighed (“Faith, Hope and Love”) — became one of the most-attended Danish films of its era: a frank, funny account of teenage life in 1960s Copenhagen that won the Bodil Award for Best Danish Film. It was the kind of film that earns a director trust — popular without being shallow, emotionally honest without needing to explain itself.

Pelle the Conqueror changed the conversation entirely. Set in late-19th-century Bornholm and following a Swedish father and his young son as they arrive as farm laborers in a foreign land, the film starred Max von Sydow and child actor Pelle Hvenegaard in a performance of extraordinary specificity. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1988, then the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, then the Golden Globe in the same category. The combination of social sweep and intimate portraiture — the kind of ambitious, patient storytelling that Hollywood had nearly stopped attempting — announced August as a director capable of the long form in the fullest sense.

He consolidated that achievement with The Best Intentions (1992), adapted from an autobiographical script by Ingmar Bergman about the early years of his parents’ marriage. Pernilla August — who would briefly become the director’s wife — starred alongside Max von Sydow; she won Best Actress at Cannes. The Palme d’Or followed. August was now one of only a handful of directors in history to win the prize twice, and both wins had come inside four years.

The decade that followed is where the story grew complicated, and where August’s record invites honest scrutiny. The House of the Spirits (1993), adapted from Isabel Allende’s novel with Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, and Winona Ryder, was ambitious and beautifully cast but received with divided reviews — the novel’s magical-realist density resisted the kind of disciplined imagery August brought to smaller-scale stories. Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1997) underperformed at the box office. Les Misérables (1998), with Liam Neeson as Valjean, was not the definitive version critics had assumed a two-time Palme d’Or winner might deliver. The films were coherent, often striking — but they did not extend the argument that Pelle and The Best Intentions had opened. In international cinema, the gap between acclaimed and essential can widen without anyone quite deciding to let it.

The return to European work produced quieter, more assured pictures. Night Train to Lisbon (2013), based on Pascal Mercier’s novel about a Swiss scholar who abandons his life on impulse to follow a mystery into Portugal, gave Jeremy Irons a role suited to his particular quality of restrained melancholy. A Fortunate Man (2018) — adapting Johannes V. Jensen’s beloved Danish novel Lykke-Per, which follows a young man’s ambition through modernizing Denmark — won August his fourth Bodil Award for Best Danish Film and reminded Danish audiences what he could still do when working close to home.

The most unexpected chapter opened late. Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction (2023), a Netflix adaptation of a Karen Blixen novella set in a small German principality, found a global streaming audience with its light touch and precise period visual language. It was followed almost immediately by The Count of Monte Cristo (2024), an eight-episode television adaptation of the Dumas classic starring Sam Claflin and Jeremy Irons — the same Irons August had directed in The House of the Spirits more than thirty years before — which drew top ratings in Italy, strong numbers across Europe, and eventually aired on PBS Masterpiece in the United States. The commercial logic of the late career proved sharper than anyone had predicted.

August has been married three times. His first marriage to actress Pernilla August ended in 1997; they had worked together on The Best Intentions, and the professional and personal intimacy of that collaboration is visible in every frame of the film. His most recent marriage, to Michelle Liebetrau in 2025, is his third. He has eight children, among them the screenwriter Anders August.

At 77, he has announced two of the most classically ambitious projects of his career: a television series built around Julius Caesar, and a feature biopic of Giorgio Armani, tentatively titled Armani: The King of Fashion, produced by Andrea Iervolino. The man who once made two of the most-decorated films in Cannes history has not, it turns out, been managing a legacy. He has been accumulating the confidence for the very large things.