Jean Anouilh
Jean Anouilh was born in Bordeaux on June 23, 1910. After completing his early schooling, Anouilh studied law for a short time at the Sorbonne, and then worked as a copywriter at Publicité Damour. He ... Read more
Jean Anouilh was born in Bordeaux on June 23, 1910. After completing his early
schooling, Anouilh studied law for a short time at the Sorbonne, and then
worked as a copywriter at Publicité Damour. He also wrote comic scenes for the
cinema. In 1929 he collaborated with Jean Aurenche on his first play, Humulus Le Muet. It was followed in the
same year by Mandarine. In 1931
Anouilh married the actress Monelle Valentin and became secretary to Louis
Jouvet's Comédie des Champs-Élysées. At the age of twenty-five Anouilh decided
to devote himself entirely to writing. During the next years Anouilh completed
several plays and gained comparative success with the production of Y Avait Un Prisonnier (1935) before his
breakthrough work Le Voyageur Sans Bagage
(1937). After that a new Anouilh play was seen in Paris almost every season.
During World War II Anouilh's Léocadia
(1940) became a hit. The lyrical fantasy depicted a prince whose love,
Léocadia, has died but who finds a new love in a young milliner who resembles
her. In 1944 he gained a wide audience with Antigone,
a version of Sophocles' classical drama, because of its thinly disguised attack
on the Nazis and on the Vichy government. After the war Anouilh was the most
successful playwright in Europe. Likewise, he enjoyed much fame in the United
States with his 'costumed' plays—plays that mixed reality with
illusion and were presented as improvisations—to which he turned in the 1950s.
Among them are L'alouette (1953, aka
'The Lark'), about Joan of Arc, which was staged in New York at
Longacre Theatre in 1955; Becket (1959),
which won a Tony Award; and La Valse Des
Toréadors (1952), whose hero, General Saint Pé, appeared in several plays
as a caricature of the author. In the 1950s Anouilh dealt with his clash with
General de Gaulle in L'hurluberlu (1958)
and Le Songe Du Critique (1960). His
works began to lose their critical favor with the emergence of such playwrights
as Ionesco and Beckett. He did not write for a while. He then returned with
plays that were marked by conservative attitudes and in which his principal
character longs for the past. These works include La Culotte (1978), in which the theme was women's liberation. In
the 1980s Anouilh directed some of his own plays as well as those of other
authors. He died in Lausanne, Switzerland on October 3, 1987.