Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (Maisons-Laffitte, 5 July 1889 – Milly-la-Forêt, 11 October 1963), French, was a poet, novelist, playwright, designer, film director, screenwriter and actor.
He was born in Maisons-Laffitte, France, a town near Paris.
His versatility, originality and enormous expressive capacity brought him international acclaim.
Despite his considerable achievements - in virtually all artistic and literary fields - Cocteau insisted that he was primarily a poet and that all his work was poetic expression.
As a leader of the Surrealist movement, he had a great influence on the work of other artists, including his friend the Montparnasse group known as Les Six.
However, although the term Surrealism was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe the collaboration of Parade Cocteau, Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso and Leonide Massine, the self-proclaimed surrealist leader André Breton said that Cocteau was a "notorious false poet, a versifier who happens to debase, instead of elevate, everything he touches." (Breton, 1953) On the sunny afternoon of August 12, 1916, Pablo Picasso, his new companion, the model Paquerette, Max Jacob, Manuel Ortiz de Zarate, Marie Vassilieff, Henri-Pierre Rochè, Moise Kisling, Amedeo Modigliani and the critic André Salmon were sitting together in front of the café La Rotonde in Montparnasse. Their friend Cocteau immortalized for posterity this extraordinary gathering of talents in a series of 21 photographs, showing many characters: an elegant Picasso dressed in the English style with a flat hat, walking stick and briar pipe; his companion, Paquerette, wearing a long elegant dress and a very frivolous hat, while Max Jacob at least looked as if he were measured and respectable and the tiny Marie Vassilieff looked like the formiable little lady that she was.
In the 1930s Cocteau had an unlikely love affair with Princess Nathalie Paley, the beautiful sister of the Grand Duke Romanov, a famous fashion-plate, actress, model and ex-wife of the dressmaker Lucine Lelong.
To Cocteau's grief and Nathalie's eternal regret, she, having become pregnant, miscarried due to the intervention of Marie-Laure de Noailles, the eccentric patron who had loved Cocteau as a young man and who was determined to ruin his new relationship.
Cocteau's last love affair was with the handsome French actor Jean Marais, whom he discovered and cast in "Beauty and the Beast".
In 1940 Le Bel Indifferent, Cocteau's play written and cast for Edith Piaf, was a huge success.
Cocteau also worked with Picasso on many projects and was friendly with most of the European art community.
He battled opium addiction for most of his adult life and was openly gay, although he had brief and complicated relationships with women.
He published a considerable amount of work criticizing homophobia.
Cocteau's films, the bulk of which he co-wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing surrealism to French cinema and influenced to some extent future French Nouvelle Vague filmmakers.
Cocteau is best known for his short story Les Enfants Terribles, from 1929, the play Les Parents Terribles, also from 1929, and the film Beauty and the Beast, from 1946.
In 1955 he was made a member of the Acadèmie française and the Acadèmie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.
During his life Jean Cocteau was: Commander of the French Legion of Honour, member of the Mallarmé Academy, the German Academy (Berlin), the Mark Twain Academy (U.S.A.), honorary president of the Cannes Film Festival, honorary president of the Franco-Hungarian Association and president of the Jazz Academy and the Disco Academy.
He died of a heart attack in 1963 and was buried in the chapel of St.
Blaise Des Simples in Milly La Foret, Essonne department, France.
Works Poetry * 1909 Aladdin's Lamp * 1910 The Frivolous Prince * 1912 Sophocle's Dance * 1919 Ode is Picasso - The Hope Cap * 1920 Escale.
Poèsies (1917-1920) * 1922 Vocabulaire * 1923 La Rose de Francois - Plain-Chant * 1925 Criècrit * 1926 L'Ange Heurtebise * 1927 Opèra * 1934 Mythologie * 1939 ènigmes * 1941 Allègories * 1945 Lèone * 1946 La Crucifixion * 1948 Poèmes * 1952 Le Chiffre sept - La Nappe du Catalan (in collaboration with Georges Hugnet) * 1953 Dentelles d'èternitè - Appogiatures * 1954 Clair-obscur * 1958 Paraprosodies * 1961 Cèrimonial espagnol du Phènix - La Partie d'èchecs * 1962 Le Requiem * 1968 Faire-Part (posthumous) Novels * 1919 Le Potomak (final edition: 1924) * 1923 Le Grand écart - Thomas the impostor * 1928 Le Livre blanc * 1929 Les Enfants terribles * 1940 La Fin du Potomak Theatre *
