Hugues de Montalembert

Hugues de Montalembert (born 1943), is a French writer, painter, and documentary filmmaker, who lost his sight in a New York apartment burglary in 1978.

Hugues de Montalembert was born as the third of seven children into an aristocratic officer family from Normandy. His father Pierre Marie Charles François de Montalembert (1914–2009) was a retired Colonel of the French Army, and his mother Yolande FitzGerald (1916–2011) came from Ireland. Hugues de Montalembert grew up on the family estate, which has been family-owned for 300 years. He is the older brother of actor Thibault de Montalembert.

In Paris, he studied law, but left the university without a diploma in 1968. Instead of pursuing a career in the military or banking sector as expected, he went to New York. In January 1970 he married the writer Idanna Pucci di Barsento in Florence. The couple lived in Bali for two years before separating in 1974, and divorcing in 1979. In 1976 de Montalembert returned to New York from Benin, where he worked on a TV documentary on traditional African religion. On his travels, he made documentary films, including some about the dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, as well as about war swords in Vietnam. He also occasionally sold some of his paintings.