Author, Film Director. She is a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and film director, who gained fame for her screenplays "India Song" in 1975 and the Academy Award nominated "Hiroshima mon amour" in 1959. Catering to a French-speaking audience, she received the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1984 for the semiautobiographical novel " L'Amant", which was adapted as the film "The Lover" in 1992. The novel, "The Lover," was translated into forty languages. Born Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu, of French Roman Catholic ancestry in what is southern Vietnam, she was age four when her father, a mathematics teacher, died. Her family had traveled to France where her father died and after settling her father's estate, she, her widowed mother and two brothers, Pierre and Paulo, returned two years later to Indochina. Not part of neither the wealthy French elite nor indigenous population, her mother, who taught school, died a few years later after a flood destroyed the family's rice farm. The difficult life experienced as an impoverished family in French Indochina during this period was highly influential on her later work. An affair between her as a teenager and Huynh Thuy Le, a rich older Chinese merchant, influenced her subsequent memoirs and fiction. After graduating from a French high school in Saigon, she left Indochina at age 18 to study law at the Sorbonne in Paris, from which she received a degree in public law in 1937. She would never return to Indochina. Politically, she joined the French Communist Party but was expelled in 1950, yet followed Marxist the rest of her life. As a young woman, she worked as a secretary in France's Ministry of Colonies from 1935 to 1941. In Nazi occupied France in 1942, she gave birth to a stillborn and learned of her brother, Paulo's death in Indochina. During World War II, her husband, Robert Antelme, a writer, was deported in 1944 to the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald for his involvement in the Resistance, and barely surviving the ordeal, her husband's weight was only 84 pounds at the end of the war. In 1943, for her first novel published "Les Impudents," she decided to use the pen name the surname of Duras, after her father's hometown village in the Lot-et-Garonne département. She was the author of many novels, plays, films, interviews, newspaper articles, essays and short stories. Besides "L'Amant," the story of her adolescence appears in three other forms: "The Sea Wall", "Eden Cinema" and "The North China Lover." "The Sea Wall" was first adapted into the 1958 film "This Angry Age" and again in 2008 by Cambodian director Rithy Panh as "The Sea Wall." Other major works include the best-seller 1958 novel, "Moderato Cantabile, which was adapted to make a film of the same name; "Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein" in 1964, and her play "India Song," which Duras directed as a 1975 same-named film. For this film, she received France's Cinema Academy Grand Prix. She wrote 34 novels from 1943 to 1993, and became an enduring part of Paris's intellectual elite. Upsetting the French elite and the church, she wrote newspaper articles denouncing French colonialization and promoting women's right to abortion. After battling alcohol abuse and a five-month coma induced by complications from emphysema, she rallied by June of 1989 to continue to write. Ending a 50-year career as an author, she died at the age of 81 in her Paris apartment, which had been her home prior to World War II. She married twice and divorced once in 1946. She and her second husband Dionys Mascolo, had her only child in 1947.