The director Clare Peploe was born in Tanzania in 1942, but grew up in England and Italy. She studied at the Sorbonne and Perugia University. She became interested in cinema and art in general from a very early age, and her first jobs had to do with photography. She found her way into the film industry as an assistant to Antonioni on Zabriskie Point (1969) and then collaborated on Novecento (1975) with her husband, the director Bernardo Bertolucci, with whom she also worked on the script for La Luna (1979).

Clare Peploe made her debut as a director with the short film, Couples and Robbers (1982), that was nominated for the Oscars and the British Bafta awards. Her first full-length film was High Season (1987), whose script she wrote together with her brother Mark Peploe. The film, starring Jacqueline Bisset, James Fox, Irene Papas and Kenneth Branagh, won the Silver Shell at the San Sebastian Festival.

The search for personal identity and a place to belong to, as well as her multicultural vision, characterise a body of work that always shows the director’s passion for telling stories. Rough Magic (1995) was the following film that she wrote and directed, and won Bridget Fonda the Best Actress award at the Sitges Festival.

In 1998 she once again worked with Bernardo Bertolucci as associate producer and co-scriptwriter on Besieged (1998), which was screened in the Official Section at the San Sebastian Festival, out of competition. Her following film, The Triumph of Love (2001), based on the play by Marivaux, competed at the Venice Film Festival.