The double life of Julian: how the bad boy painter turned fêted director

Just over two decades ago, he was famed as the "bad boy" of the New York art scene, a notorious figure in the city who emerged from nowhere to dominate the inner circle of Greenwich Village's most luminous modern painters.

That was until Julian Schnabel decided to turn his attentions to film-making. This week, his transformation from acclaimed artist to award-winning director was complete after the former taxi driver, cook and arch-bohemian won the coveted director's prize at Cannes for his French language feature film, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

Schnabel's third film, written by the Oscar-winning British screenwriter Ronald Harwood, had made such an impact on critics that it was tipped to win the Palme D'Or, the biggest prize of the festival.

The accolade which Schnabel ended up winning is nonetheless a rare honour for a director who has come to film as a second career - and it is one that has made him the surprise success story of Cannes.

Previous directors to have won the prize include the arthouse heavyweight Gus Van Sant for his film Elephant in 2003, as well as Michael Haneke for The Piano Teacher in 2001 and Kevin Macdonald for The Last King of Scotland, about the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, last year.

In comparison with these cinematic stalwarts, Schnabel is a neophyte. Awarded his prize by the Cannes jury, which was chaired by the director Stephen Frears, the 55-year-old based his third film on the delicately moving account of a French magazine editor, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a stroke that left him permanently unable to move or speak.

The late journalist, who is played by the French actor Mathieu Amalric in the film, described living with his condition, known as "locked-in syndrome", in his memoir.

Triggered by a stroke in 1995, when Bauby was only 43, the condition meant that he could only communicate by blinking his left eye-lid. Apart from this, his body was paralysed. Bauby wrote the book by blinking when the correct letter was reached by a person who called out the letters of the alphabet. It was published in France in March 1997. Bauby died five days later.

Asked why he had chosen to make the film in French rather than English, Schnabel said: "This is a story that was written by a Frenchman in a French hospital. I didn't want American or English actors to come here and take on a French accent, so that French people would need subtitles."

Schnabel has always been known as a flamboyant and uncompromising character with an uncanny ability to get noticed.

In the 1980s, he became an almost overnight artistic superstar, famed as much for his work as his eccentric and charismatic personality - he wore a dilettante uniform of pyjamas, slippers and a robe while he painted in his studio.

He was born in Brooklyn but uprooted soon after with his family to Brownsville, Texas, where he spent most of his formative years.

Schnabel made his first concrete foray into the art world when, after studying at the University of Houston, he sent an application to the independent study programme at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His offering included slides of his work sandwiched between two pieces of bread - and he was promptly accepted on to the course.

After completing the programme, Schnabel toured around Europe, living a bohemian lifestyle, before returning to New York City to focus on his art.

As a struggling artist, Schnabel worked as a cook by day and socialised at Max's Kansas City, the restaurant-nightclub in Greenwich Village, by night - all the time working on his painting and nurturing a growing desire to become a known figure on the city's art scene.

He soon became known for using enormous canvases which he filled with vibrant colours. In 1979, when he launched his first exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York, he earned an almost instant following.

He then participated in the Venice Biennale in 1980 and, by the time he exhibited his work in a show a year later, he had become a firmly established figure.

His "plate paintings" - large-scale works set on broken ceramic plates - as well as his traditional Japanese Kabuki theatrical sets using velvet and animal hides, elicited divided responses from the art critics. Some were offended by his deliberate flouting of the conventions of "high art", while others hailed his work as following in the best traditions of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock.

Speaking about his paintings, Schnabel has said he was attempting to create "an emotional state, a state that people can literally walk into and be engulfed by."

For his followers, his work represented the return of painting to an art scene that had previously revolved around conceptual and minimalist art.

But Schnabel's fame came from more than just his artwork. Some felt his popularity in the 1980s was synonymous with consumerism and that he exemplified the cold commercialisation of the art world that was tied to the economic boom of the era.

His critics claimed that his eccentric, pyjama-wearing persona outshone his work. But the art-buying public loved him, and his exhibitions were nearly always sold out.

A prolific artist who managed to produce a steady flow of new work, Schnabel is said to have once sold more than 60 canvases in one year.

His works were bought widely and are in museums throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Riding on his success, he wrote an autobiography at the age of 35 about his early life and his "discovery", even after which he preserved his artistic integrity. Written in a flat, almost minimalist style, he recounted the daily activities of his artistic clique in SoHo and offered tough-talking advice to aspiring artists.

When his profile as a painter began to fade slightly in the 1990s, the ever-resourceful artist turned to the fresh medium of film, which he conquered with his distinctive biopics that have been winning critical acclaim ever since his debut in 1996.

He wrote and directed his first film, Basquiat, a biopic on the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, which was shown in competition at the 1996 Venice Film Festival.

The movie, which featured a glittering cast including David Bowie, Gary Oldman, Dennis Hopper, Benicio Del Toro and Courtney Love, told the story of the 19-year-old black graffiti artist who was catapulted to stardom and who moved in the same artistic circles as Andy Warhol as well as Schnabel himself, before burning out at 27.

His second film, Before Night Falls, which was released in 2000, again received widespread critical acclaim and its lead actor, Javier Bardem, was nominated for an Oscar.

Another biopic, it traced the life of the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, whose work and openly gay lifestyle brought him into conflict with Cuba's Communist government in the 1960s. He was sent to prison after being convicted of "ideological deviation" and, after serving his sentence, fled to the United States - only to be diagnosed with Aids in 1987 and to die of an overdose of drugs and alcohol in 1990.

In a dramatic suicide note, written for publication, Arenas wrote: "I am ending my life ... I want to encourage the Cuban people out of the country as well as on the Island to continue fighting for freedom ... Cuba will be free. I already am."

Schnabel's award-winning achievement with his third biopic will surely come as a personal triumph, and ultimate proof of his directorial talents.

The Cannes party for Le Scaphandre et le Papillon is said to have borne all the hallmarks of the flamboyance with which Schnabel is so synonymous.

There was a huge glass cage of giant Atlas butterflies at the venue, some of which were let loose or pinned to the shoulders' of cocktail waitresses.

But as a film-maker, he has been far more retiring in his public persona than he was as an artist in the 1980s.

So his Cannes glory may give Schnabel, so vilified by those who claimed his self-promoting personality outshone his artistic merits, a particularly deep sense of satisfaction.

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