Jean Anouilh
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Jean Anouilh (June 23, 1910 – October 3, 1987) was a French dramatist.
He was born in Cérisole, a small village on the outskirts of Bordeaux and had Basque ancestry. His father was a tailor and Anouilh maintained that he inherited from him a pride in conscientious craftmanship. He may owe his artistic bent to his mother, a violinist who eked out the family's meager budget playing summer seasons in the casino orchestra in the nearby seaside resort of Arachon.
Anouilh attended the école primaire supérieure where he received his secondary education at the Collège Chaptal. Jean-Louis Barrault, later a major French director, was a pupil there at the same time and recalls Anouilh as an intense, rather dandified figure who hardly noticed a lad some two years younger than himself. Anouilh enrolled as a law student in the University of Paris, only to abandon the course after just eighteen months when he found employment in the advertising industry. He liked the work and spoke more than once with wry approval of the lessons in the classical virtues of brevity and precision of language the he learned drafting copy.
In 1932, his first play, L’Hermine, written in 1929, flopped, but he followed it up with a string of others. He struggled through years of poverty producing several plays until he eventually wound up as secretary to the great actor-director Louis Jouvet. He quickly discovered he could not get along with this gruff man and left his company.
He was an outstanding writer with a unique ability to craft a wide spectrum of brilliant masterpieces. In 1970 his work was recognized with the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.
Anouilh married actress Monelle Valentin in 1931 and soon after had a child. He died in Lausanne, Switzerland.
[edit] Works
- L'Hermine (The Ermine) (1931)
- Mandarine (1933)
- Y avait un prisonnier (There Was a Prisoner) (1935)
- Le voyageur sans bagage (Traveller without Luggage) (1937)
- La sauvage (Restless Heart) (1938)
- Le Bal des Voleurs (Thieves' Carnival) (1938)
- Léocadia (Time Remembered) (1940)
- Eurydice (Point of Departure and Legend of Lovers) (1941)
- Le rendez-vous de Senlis (The Rendezvous at Senlis and Dinner with the Family) (1941)
- Antigone (1942)
- Roméo et Jeannette (Romeo and Jeannette) (1946)
- L'Invitation au Château (Ring Round the Moon) (1947)
- Ardèle ou la Marguerite (Ardèle; The Cry of the Peacock) (1948)
- La répétition ou l'amour puni (The Rehearsal) (1950)
- Colombe (Mademoiselle Colombe) (1951)
- La valse des toréadors (The Waltz of the Toreadors) (1952)
- L'Alouette (The Lark) (1952)
- Ornifle ou le courant d'air (Ornifle or It's Later than you Think) (1955)
- Pauvre Bitos ou le dîner de têtes (Poor Bitos, or The Masked Dinner) (1956)
- L'hurluberlu ou le réactionnaire amoureux (The Fighting Cock) (1959)
- La petite Molière (1959)
- Becket ou l'honneur de Dieu (Becket or The Honor of God) (1959)
- La Grotte (The Cavern) (1961)
- Le boulanger, la boulangère et le petit mitron (1968)
- Cher Antoine; ou l'amour raté (Dear Antoine; or The Love that Failed) (1969)
- Les poissons rouges; ou Mon père, ce héros (The Goldfish) (1970)
- Tu étais si gentil quand tu étais petit (You Were So Nice When You Were Young) (1972)
- Monsieur Barnett (1974)
- L'Arrestation (1975)
- Chers zoizeaux (1976)
- Vive Henri IV (1978)
- La Culotte (1978)
- La Foire d'empoigne (Catch as Catch Can) (1979)
- Le Nombril (The Navel) (1981)
