Richard Roud

Richard Stanley Roud (July 6, 1929 – February 13, 1989) was an American writer on film and co-founder, with Amos Vogel, of the New York Film Festival (NYFF). At the NYFF, Roud was a former program director, and latterly director, from 1963 to 1987.

Biography Roud was born in Boston to a second-generation American family whose origins were in Riga, Latvia. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1950, and after spending a year in Paris and Montpellier on a Fulbright scholarship, undertook post-graduate study at the University of Birmingham. In 1963 co-founded the New York Film Festival, where he headed up the selection committee. From 1963 to 1969, he was also film critic for The Guardian in London, a role from which he was fired after writing a one-word review of The Sound of Music (simply, "No."), and was later a roving arts correspondent for the newspaper.

Roud's books include Max Ophuls: An Index (1958), Cinema – A Critical Dictionary – The Major Film-Makers (1980), a two-volume work which he edited; A Passion for Film (1983), a biography of Henri Langlois, the former director of the Cinémathèque Française; and two books on nouvelle vague directors Straub and Godard. For several years he was writing a biography of François Truffaut and submitted a draft just before Roud's death. A volume of Roud's previously uncollected writings, Decades Never Start on Time: A Richard Roud Anthology, was published by the BFI in 2014.

He was made a Knight in the French Legion of Honor in 1979 and was the recipient of the National Society of Film Critics Awards (USA) Special Award in January 1988.

Death In January 1989 he went on holiday to the South of France where he suffered a massive heart attack and died in hospital in Nîmes on 13 February 1989.