Trivia

Manoel died while working on a movie at the age of 106, making him the oldest filmmaker.

His first and second feature films were separated by 20 years.

He is the only filmmaker whose career spans from the silent era to the digital age.

Did not become a full-time Director until he was 73 years old.

Manoel de Oliveira's favorite films: Berlin: Symphony of Metropolis (1927) Melodie der Welt (1929) Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Rain (1929) À Propos de Nice (1930) City Lights (1931) Rebecca (1940) The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) Gertrud (1964) Belle de Jour (1967) The Marquise of O (1976) Trás-os-Montes (1976) The Other One (1981) Cinco Dias, Cinco Noites (1996) River of Gold (1998) Colossal Youth (2006).

Was known for being a cheerful person and passionate about his movies.

Directed his first feature film at the age of 33.

He was still making plans for new feature films just months before his death.

Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1981.

Was a fan of the team FC Porto.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 832-837. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

When he was 20, he studied in Actors School of Cinema.

Whether a late bloomer or a victim of unfortunate delays and political censorship, he became Portugal's preeminent filmmaker during the later part of his long life. Film critic J. Hoberman has said "at an age when many men think of retirement, Oliveira emerged from obscurity as one of the 70s leading modernists, a peer of Straub, Syberberg and Duras.".

Oliveira turned his attention back to filmmaking when he saw Walther Ruttmann's documentary Berlin: Symphony of a City. Ruttman's film is the most famous of a small, short lived silent documentary film genre, the city-symphony film. Oliveira said that Ruttman's film was his "most useful lesson in film technique", but that he also found it cold, mechanical and lacking humanity. The discovery of Ruttman's film prompted Oliveira to direct his own first film in 1931, a documentary short titled Douro, Faina Fluvial. The film is a portrait of his hometown Porto and the labor and industry that takes place along the cities main river, the Douro River.

In 1997 Oliveira made Voyage to the Beginning of the World (Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo), which was the final film of Italian film star Marcello Mastroianni. In the film Mastroianni plays an aging film director named Manoel who travels on a road trip across Northern Portugal with French film actor Afonso (Jean-Yves Gautier) and two other young companions, Judite (Leonor Silveira) and Duarte (Diogo Dória). Afonso wants to see the Portuguese village that his father grew up in and see the relatives that he has never met. On the way, Manoel stops at several locations on the road that he remembers from his childhood, only to find them much different than he had remembered. The film is autobiographical in that the locations on the road are real locations from Oliveira's childhood. The film is also based on the experiences of actor Yves Afonso, whose father had immigrated from Portugal to France and who had met his long lost relatives during a French-Portuguese co-production in 1987. The film was screened out of competition at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI Prize and a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury. It won other awards at the 1997 Haifa International Film Festival and the 1997 Tokyo International Film Festival.

Manoel de Oliveira married Maria Isabel Brandão de Meneses de Almeida Carvalhais (1 September 1918 - 11 September 2019) in Porto on December 4, 1940. They remained married for nearly 75 years and had four children.

In his younger days, Oliveira competed as a race car driver. During the 1937 Grand Prix season, he competed in and won the International Estoril Circuit race, driving a Ford V8 Specia.

Manoel and Maria Isabel (b. 1918) are parents of two boys named Manuel Casimiro de Oliveira (b. December 21st 1941) and José Manuel de Oliveira (b. June 4th 1944) and two girls named Isabel Maria de Oliveira (b. June 29th 1947) and Adelaide Maria de Oliveira (b. October 10th 1948).

In an interview conducted less than five months before his death, Oliveira revealed that he had plans for future films.

In November 2013 he announced production of the short film The Old Man of Belem, pending government funding. This was his last completed film and premiered at the 71st Venice International Film Festival and was released in Porto in November 2014. Oliveira originally intended to shoot the film on a studio set, but because of his failing health it was shot in a garden close to his home in Porto.

In 2002, Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura completed "Cinema House" in Porto, which was designed to commemorate the work of Oliveira.

Because of his anti- Salazar comments Oliveira made after a screening of "O Acto de Primavera", he was arrested by the PIDE in 1963. He spent 10 days in jail and was interrogated until finally being released with the help of his friend Manuel Meneres. His career again slowed down and he only completed two short documentaries in the next 9 years.

His first documentary short wastitled Douro, Faina Fluvial. Rino Lupo invited Oliveira to show the film at the International Congress of Film Critics in Lisbon, where the majority of the Portuguese audience booed. However other foreign critics and artists who were in attendance praised the film, such as Luigi Pirandello and Émile Vuillermoz. Oliveira re-edited the film with a new soundtrack and re-released it in 1934. And again in 1994, Oliveira modified the film by adding a new, more avant-garde soundtrack by Freitas Branco.

On December 10, 2014 Oliveira was appointed grand officier of the French Légion d'Honneur in a ceremony conducted by France's ambassador to Portugal at the Museu da Fundação Serralves in Porto.

Oliveira's first attempt at filmmaking was in 1927 when he and his friends worked on a film about the Portuguese participation in World War I, although the film was never made.

He enrolled in Italian film-maker Rino Lupo's acting school at age 20 and appeared as an extra in Lupo's film Fátima Milagrosa.

From the 1970s, Oliveira was at his most active, with the vast majority of his films having been made after he turned 75.

His movie "O Acto de Primavera" was called the first political film from Portugal by film critic Henrique Costa and gave Oliveira his first worldwide recognition as a filmmaker. The film won the Grand Prix at the Siena Film Festival and Oliveira had his first film retrospective at the Locarno Film Festival in 1964.

In 1933 he had the distinction of having acted in the second Portuguese sound film, A Canção de Lisboa.

With a newfound artistic freedom after António de Oliveira Salazar's stroke in 1968 and the April 1974 Carnation Revolution, Oliveira's career began to flourish and receive international acclaim. Ironically the Carnation Revolution also resulted in his family's factories being occupied by factions of the Left and subsequently going bankrupt. Due to this, Oliveira lost most of his personal wealth and his home of thirty-five years.

Fifteen years after his first attempt at filmmaking, Oliveira made his feature film debut in 1942. Aniki-Bóbó is a portrait of Porto's street children and based on a short story by Rodrigo de Freitas. Oliveira used non-professional actors to portray the children. The film was a commercial failure when it opened, and its merit only came to be recognized over time. Oliveira stated that he was criticized for portraying children that lied, cheated and stole, which in his mind made them act more like adults. The film's poor reception forced Oliveira to abandon other film projects he was involved in, after which he dedicated himself to work in a vineyard that his wife had inherited.

In 1963, Rite of Spring (O Acto de Primavera), a partly documentary, partly narrative film depicting an annual passion play, marked a turning point for his career. The play is based on a 16th-century passion play by Francisco Vaz de Guimarães and was actually performed by villagers in northern Portugal. Along with the performance of the play, Oliveira staged the actors rehearsals, spectators watching the actors and even himself and his crew preparing to film the performance. Oliveira said that making the film "profoundly altered his conception of cinema" as a tool not to simulate reality, but merely represent it.

His father owned a dry-goods factory, produced the first electric light bulbs in Portugal and built an electric energy plant before he died in 1932.

In the 30's Oliveira struggled to make films, abandoning several ambitious projects and making a handful of short documentaries on subjects ranging from artistic portraits of coastal cities in Portugal to industrial films on the origins of Portugal's auto industry. One of these shorts was a documentary about the inauguration of the hydro-electrical plant that his father built, Hulha Branca.

In the early 1950s he and writer José Régio submitted a screenplay to the Estado Novo-run Film Fund commission, but the commission refused to either accept or reject the film. Oliveira attributed this to his own well known dislike for the Salazar regime.

As a teenager his goal was to become an actor. At 17, he joined his brothers as an executive in his father's factories, where he remained for the majority of his adult life when not making films. In a 1981 Sight and Sound article, John Gillett describes Oliveira as having "spent most of his life in business ... making films only when circumstances allowed.".

Oliveira's work since the 1990s was the most prolific of his entire career and he made at least one film a year (usually feature narratives but sometimes shorts or documentaries) between 1990 and 2012. During this period he established and consistently worked with a loyal troupe of regular actors including his grandson Ricardo Trêpa, John Malkovich, Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli.

In November 2012 Oliveira was honored with a week-long tribute and retrospective at the 16th Citéphilo in Lille, France.

He was awarded two Career Golden Lions, in 1985 and 2004, and an Honorary Golden Palm for his lifetime achievements in 2008.

In 2006 Oliveira made Belle Toujours, a sequel to Luis Buñuel's 1967 film, Belle de Jour. The film stars Bulle Ogier as Séverine Serizy and Michel Piccoli reprising his original role of Henri Husson.[54] In the film, Séverine reluctantly agrees to see Henri for the first time in forty years out of curiosity to know if her former blackmailer told her dying husband about her secret life as a prostitute.

He was also awarded the Order of St. James of the Sword by the President of Portugal.

In March 2013 Oliveira attended a screening of Aniki-Bóbó at the International Film Festival of Porto, which commemorated the 70th anniversary of the film.

In 1989 and in 2008, Oliveira was awarded doctorate degrees honoris causa by the University of Porto and by the University of the Algarve.

Grandfather of Ricardo Trêpa, Susana Trêpa, Jorge Trêpa (Adelaide's children), David, b. 1974 (Manuel Casimiro's son) and Filipe (José Manuel's son).

Brother of Casimiro de Oliveira.

Son of Franciso José de Oliveira and Cândida Ferreira Pinto.

Among his numerous awards were the Career Golden Lion from the 61st Venice International Film Festival, the Special Lion for the Overall Work in the 42nd Venice International Film Festival, an Honorary Golden Palm for his lifetime achievements in 2008 Cannes Film Festival and the French Legion of Honor. He was also awarded the Order of St. James of the Sword by the President of Portugal.

He was chosen to give the welcoming speech at Pope Benedict XVI's meeting with representatives of the Portuguese cultural world on May 12, 2010, at the Belém Cultural Center.

Manoel de Oliveira, at the age of 101, was chosen to give the welcoming speech at Pope Benedict XVI's meeting with representatives of the Portuguese cultural world on May 12, 2010, at the Belém Cultural Center.

Grandfather of Ricardo Trêpa.