Jean Cocteau

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Image:JeanCocteau.jpg Template:French literature (small) Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (July 5, 1889 – October 11, 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker. He was born at Maisons-Laffitte, France, a small town near Paris. His versatile, unconventional approach and enormous output brought him international acclaim.

1 Early years
2 Later years
3 Awards and recognitions
4 Filmography as director
5 Books by Jean Cocteau
6 External links
7 Other references

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Early years

Despite his achievements in virtually all literary and artistic fields, Cocteau insisted that he was primarily a poet and that all his work was poetry. As an important exponent of Surrealism, he had great influence on the work of others, including the group of composer friends in Montparnasse known as Les Six. The word Surrealism was coined, in fact, by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe Cocteau's 1917 collaboration with Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso, and Léonide Massine Parade. Self-proclaimed Surrealism leader André Breton, nonetheless, declared Cocteau a "notorious false poet, a versifier who happens to debase rather than to elevate everything he touches" (Breton, 1953).

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Later years

In the 1930s, Cocteau had an unlikely affair with Princess Nathalie Paley, the beautiful daughter of a Romanov grand duke and herself a fashion-plate, sometimes actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong. She became pregnant. To Cocteau's distress and Paley's life-long regret, the fetus was aborted. Cocteau's longest-lasting relationship was with the French actor Jean Marais, whom he cast in Beauty and the Beast. Cocteau is also rumored to have carried on a relationship with Panama Al Brown, a boxer he managed during the 1930's [1].

In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent, Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf, was enormously successful. He also worked with Picasso on several projects and was friends with most of the European art community. He struggled with an opium addiction for most of his adult life and was openly gay, though he had a few brief and complicated affairs with women. He published a considerable amount of work criticising homophobia.

Cocteau's films, the bulk of which he both wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing Surrealism into French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave genre.

Cocteau is best known for Les enfants terribles, the 1929 play Les parents terribles, and the 1946 film, Beauty and the Beast.

Cocteau died in 1963 at the age of 74 (on the exact same day as his friend Édith Piaf) and is buried in Chapelle St. Blaise Des Simples, Milly La Foret, Essonne, France.

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Awards and recognitions

In 1955 he was made a member of the Académie française and The Royal Academy of Belgium.

During his life Cocteau was commander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Mallarmé Academy, German Academy (Berlin), American Academy, Mark Twain (U.S.A) Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes film festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association and President of the jazz Academy and of the Academy of the Disc.

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Filmography as director

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Books by Jean Cocteau

Selected works:

Cocteau, Jean, The Art of Cinema, edited by André Bernard and Claude Gauteur, translated by Robin Buss, Marion Boyars, London, 1988
Cocteau, Jean, Diary of an Unknown, translated by Jesse Browner, Paragon House Publishers, New York, 1988
Cocteau, Jean, The Eagle Has Two Heads, adapted by Ronald Duncan, Vision Press Ltd., Great Britain, 1947
Cocteau, Jean, The Holy Terrors (Les enfants terribles), translated by Rosamond Lehmann, New Directions Publishing Corp., New York, 1957
Cocteau, Jean, The Human Voice, translated by Carl Wildman, Vision Press Ltd., Great Britain, 1947
Cocteau, Jean, The Infernal Machine And Other Plays, translated by W.A. Auden, E.E. Cummings, Dudley Fitts, Albert Bermel, Mary C. Hoeck, and John K. Savacool, New Directions Books, New York, 1963
Cocteau, Jean, Les parents terribles, new translation by Jeremy Sams, Nick Hern Books, London, 1994
Cocteau, Jean, The White Book (Le livre blanc), translated by Margaret Crosland, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1989
Cocteau, Jean, Le coq et l'arlequin: Notes autour de la musique - avec un portrait de l'Auteur et deux monogrammes par P. Picasso, Paris, Éditions de la Sirène, 1918
Cocteau, Jean, Opium: The Diary of a Cure, translated by Margaret Crosland and Sinclair Road, Grove Press Inc., New York, 1958