Born on March 23, 1942, Michael Haneke is the son of German director and actor Fritz Haneke and Austrian actress Beatrix von Degenschild. He grew up in Wiener Neustadt.
Haneke studied philosophy, psychology, and theater in Vienna, exploring writing, as well as film and literary criticism, before working as an editor and teleplay writer for Südwestfunk (ARD) in Baden-Baden. In 1974, he directed his first television film, followed by several TV adaptations of works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Rosei, Franz Kafka, and original screenplays of his own.
In the early 1970s, Haneke made his debut as a theater director at the Stadttheater Baden-Baden with Marguerite Duras' Entire Days in the Trees. His subsequent theater productions were staged in Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich, and Vienna, along with two acclaimed opera productions in Paris and Madrid in the following decades.
The Seventh Continent, Haneke's first feature film, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989. The story of a middle-class Austrian family and its self-eradication was the first chapter of a trilogy that made him an international figure by the mid-1990s. His following film Funny Games (1997), also presented in Cannes, was the first Austrian competition entry in 35 years.
Michael Haneke is known for his precise, non-sentimental view of contemporary society in the way he conducts his actors and his uncompromising, partly distressing, narrative constructions. Together with the continuous expansion of his thematic and stylistic spectrum, these qualities made him one of the leading personalities in world cinema.
Haneke’s seventh feature film, The Piano Teacher (based on Elfriede Jelinek's novel), won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, with Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Magimel winning Best Actress and Best Actor, respectively. His 2005 film Hidden earned him the prize for Best Director.
The historical black-and-white feature The White Ribbon (2009) and the drama Amour (2012), starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, both won the Palme d'Or and the European Film Award. Additionally, Amour received a Golden Globe and an Oscar. Haneke has been teaching Directing at the Vienna Film Academy since 2002. He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Paris VIII in 2012 and the University of Graz in 2013.