Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau was born on July 5, 1889, in Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris. A playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist, and critic, Cocteau considered himself above all else a poet, categorizing his vast body of work as “poésie, poésie de roman, poésie de théâtre, poésie critique, poésie graphique and poésie cinématographique.” In the period before World War I, he became associated with the avant-garde Cubists, Fauvists, and Futurists, meeting and working with Pablo Picasso and the composer Erik Satie, and establishing himself as a leading member of the French avant-garde. 

Cocteau’s first collection of poems, La Lampe d’Aladin [Aladdin’s Lamp] (Société d’édition, 1909), was published when he was nineteen. His other collections of poetry include Cri écrit [Written Cry] (M. Maynard, 1925); Vocabulaire [Vocabulary] (Éditions de la Sirène, 1922); and Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance [The Cape of Good Hope] (Éditions de la Sirène, 1919). Among his most celebrated poems is L’Ange Heurtebise [The Angel Heurtebise] (1925). 

Extraordinarily well-connected across the arts, Cocteau maintained friendships with poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, painters Picasso and Georges Braque, and composers Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger. At the urging of Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, Cocteau wrote the scenario for the landmark 1917 ballet Parade, produced with sets by Picasso and music by Satie. Cocteau’s involvement with ballet brought him into contact in the early 1920s with a group of six young composers—Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre, Georges Auric, and Louis Durey—for whom he acted as spokesman, bringing “Les Six” into prominence throughout Europe.

Cocteau’s play Orphée [Orpheus] was staged in Paris in 1926, and in 1929, one of his most celebrated works, the novel Les Enfants terribles [The Holy Terrors] (Éditions Bernard Grasset), was published. He returned to filmmaking in the 1940s, first as a screenwriter and then as a director, making La Belle et la bête [Beauty and the Beast] (1946), a fantasy based on the fairy tale, and Orphée (1949), a reimagining of the themes of poetry and death he had explored in his play. Also a visual artist of significance, Cocteau decorated the Villa Santo Sospir, located in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, in 1950, and completed a series of frescoes for the City Hall in Menton, transformed the interior of the fourteenth-century Romanesque Chapel of Saint-Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer, and restored the Church of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. 

Cocteau was elected to the Académie Française in 1955. He died on October 11, 1963, in Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris.