Jean-Pierre Mocky, who has died aged 86, was, according to Le Monde, “perhaps the most inventive, the most prolific, the most anarchic of French film directors”. Certainly, there is agreement that he was the most unclassifiable.

Mocky directed approximately 60 films, mostly satirical comedies, from 1960, averaging around two a year, until his yet to be released last movie, Tous Flics! (Everyone Is a Cop). Working cheaply, quickly and quirkily, he was able to attract many of France’s most popular actors, who were quite willing to work for nothing. Regulars included Michel Serrault, with whom he made 12 pictures, Jean Poiret, Francis Blanche, Bourvil and Jacqueline Maillan. Mocky also directed Catherine Deneuve in Agent Trouble (1987); Jeanne Moreau in The Miracle (1986) and Stéphane Audran in The Seasons of Pleasure (1988), all of whom he attempted to deglamorise. In a way, Mocky wanted to make his rigorously independent films popular outside the mainstream commercial cinema.

Mocky made his debut as a feature film director in 1959 with Les Dragueurs (aka The Young Have No Morals/The Cheaters/The Chasers). It starred Jacques Charrier and Charles Aznavour as two young men, experienced and shy respectively, who spend an evening in Paris searching for their ideal girl, and end up at a society orgy.

This was followed by Un Couple (The Love Trap, 1960), which dealt frankly and sympathetically with a husband (Jean Kosta) and wife (Juliette Mayniel) who decide to part after three years of happy marriage before it begins to pall. Like Les Dragueurs it was made in the spirit of the New Wave, with a bizarre toy factory where the husband works, and the grotesque supporting characters hinting at what was to come.

The first authentic Mockyesque film was Snobs! (1962), in which the president of a milk cooperative is drowned in a vat while inspecting a dairy plant. Four directors become rivals for his post, each playing on the snobbery and foibles of the electors.

Un Drôle de Paroissien (Heaven Sent, 1963), Mocky’s first tilt at religious hypocrisy, told of an aristocratic family who have fallen on hard times, but never waver in the conviction that they were not born to work. One of them, the ultra-religious Georges (Bourvil), takes the sound of coins dropping into the church offertory as a sign from the Lord to him to remove money from poor boxes to save his family. It was the first of four iconoclastic comedies Mocky made with the great screen comic.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jacques Charrier, Dany Carrel, Estella Blain and Charles Aznavour in the film Les Dragueurs (The Chasers, 1959), directed by Jean-Pierre Mocky. Photograph: Allstar

From 1970 Mocky began to appear in many of his own films, starting with Solo, in which he played a jewel thief who gets involved with the 1968 anti-bourgeois student movement. In The Albatross (or Love Hate, 1971), Mocky is a criminal escaping from jail, who takes the daughter of a corrupt politician hostage. Typically, these political thrillers shift from melodrama to satire to farce. The best examples of his caustic comedies were Kill the Referee (1984), an attack on football hooliganism, and The Miracle (1987), an exposé of the “miracle industry” at Lourdes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Francis Blanche and Bourvil in Un Drôle de Paroissien (Heaven Sent, 1963), Jean-Pierre Mocky’s first attack on religious hypocrisy. Photograph: Atica/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

At the same time, Mocky gained a reputation on French television talk shows for his angry outbursts, railing against politicians, the Catholic church, film distributors, producers and critics. Mocky’s credo could have been Groucho Marx’s “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

His film career had begun through acting, most notably in Michelangelo Antonioni’s I Vinti (The Vanquished, 1953) and Georges Franju’s La Tête Contre les Murs (The Keepers, 1959.) In the latter, for which he wrote the screenplay, the handsome Mocky played a rebellious and wealthy young man who is committed by his father to a mental home.

Mocky was born in Nice as Jean-Paul Mokiejewski, the son of Polish immigrants, a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. Although Nice was in a free zone during the Nazi occupation of France, Mocky’s father took the precaution of getting his young son out of the country by sending him to a cousin in Algeria. Because children under 10 were not allowed to travel alone, Mocky’s father managed to get his birth certificate altered to three and a half years older.

Thus, the deception enabled Mocky to marry at the age of 13 – the marriage lasted three months – and drive a taxi aged 16.

His survivors include a son, the actor and theatre director Stanislas Nordey, from a relationship with the actor Véronique Nordey; a daughter, Olivia, from his second marriage, to Marisa Muxen; and his partner, the actor and ex-model Patricia Barzyk.

• Jean-Pierre Mocky (Jean-Paul Mokiejewski), film director, actor, screenwriter and producer, born 6 July 1933; died 8 August 2019