Roland Topor

Roland Topor was a French filmmaker, writer, painter and illustrator. In 1962 he founded the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal. He wrote the novel The Tenant in 1964, which Roman Polanski later filmed as The Tenant (1976); a remake, Le nouveau locataire (2013), also appeared. He published drawing books such as Dessins panique (1965) and Toporland (1975). Alongside René Laloux, he worked on The Dead Times (1964) and The Snails (1966), then on the feature Fantastic Planet (1973), their most famous collaboration. With Henri Xhonneux he created the French television series Téléchat (1982), which used puppets of a cat and an ostrich to parody news broadcasts. As an actor, his best-known part was Renfield in the Werner Herzog film Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). He died in 1997.