in Maisons-Lafitte, France, on July 5, 1889: French writer, visual
artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. His works are marked by
extravagant experimentation and mind-bending effects in nearly every
The poet, playwright, author, and
film director enjoyed early success with his poems, which he fully exploited
while sponsoring Picasso, Stravinsky, Giorgio de Chirico, and the musical
group known as Les Six. During the course of his life, Cocteau worked
actor, director, scenario writer, novelist, critic, and artist, all of his
work being marked by verve and cutting-edge brilliance.
experimented in almost every artistic medium and was regarded as a leader of the
French avant-garde in the 1920s. His first great success as a writer
came with the publication of the novel, Les Enfants Terribles (The Terrible Children,
1929), which he made into a film in 1950. Surrealistic fantasy suffuses his
films as well as his literary works.
Among Cocteau's best dramatic works
are Orphée (Orpheus, 1926) and
La Machine Infernale (The Infernal Machine, 1934), in which the Orpheus and Oedipus myths are surrealistically adapted
to modern circumstances.
films include Le Sang du Poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1932),
La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946), and Orpheus
(1949). Other works include ballets, sketches, monologues, whimsical
drawings, and the text (written with Stravinsky) for the opera-oratorio,
Oedipus Rex (1927).
true Renaissance man born before his time--died in 1963.
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