Feyder came to Paris as an actor in 1912 and directed his first film the next year. The realistic L'Atlantide (1921), based on the novel by Pierre Benoît, was his first box-office success, but it was Crainquebille (1922), from Anatole France's novel of daily Parisian life, that established his reputation as a director. He became a naturalized French citizen in 1928.

After filming Thérèse Raquin (1928), based on Émile Zola's novel, in Germany, Feyder returned to France to do Les Nouveaux Messieurs (1928; “The New Gentlemen”), a picture banned by the French government for its lightly satiric treatment of the French Parliament. Feyder spent the next five years in Hollywood, where his pictures included The Kiss (1929), an important silent film starring Greta Garbo; Daybreak (1931); and Son of India (1931).

Except for Knight Without Armour (1937), directed in England, Feyder's remaining pictures were made in France and starred his wife, the actress Françoise Rosay. Outstanding among them were Le Grand Jeu (1934; “The Great Game”), Pension Mimosas (1934), and La Kermesse héroïque (1935; Carnival in Flanders). Their complexity of characterizations and naturalistic fatalism foreshadowed the French film revival of the late 1930s led by Marcel Carné (Carné, Marcel), who at one time had been Feyder's assistant.