Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, librettist and film director, whose versatility, unconventionality, and enormous output brought him international acclaim. He was a leading member of the Surrealist movement, and had great influence on the work of others.

Cocteau was born on July 5, 1889, at Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris. Over-indulged by his mother (his father committed suicide in 1898), he was a poor student, and his lack of motivation overshadowed his intellect. He dropped out of school and left Paris. At the age of 16, Cocteau met the actor Édouard de Max, who launched him as a poet. At de Max's invitation, a fashionable audience attended a reading of Cocteau's poems on April 4, 1908. His first volume of verse, La Lampe d'Aladin, appeared in 1909 and quickly established him as an important writer.

The establishment of the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1909 brought its great impresario Sergei Diaghilev into Cocteau's world and involved the poet in the theatre. After Cocteau expressed his wish to create ballets, Diaghilev challenged him to “Surprise me”. Diaghilev later produced Cocteau's ballet scenarios: Parade (1917, music by the French composer Erik Satie) and Le Boeuf sur le Toit (The Nothing-Doing Bar, 1920, music by the French composer Darius Milhaud).

During World War I Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. During that same period he met Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and many other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated or who influenced his life. In 1923 Cocteau became addicted to opium, an experience described in Opium (1923), and was forced to spend a period of recovery in a sanatorium. During this time he produced some of his major works—the plays Orphée (1926; Orpheus, 1933) and La Machine Infernale (The Time Bomb, 1934); the novel Children of the Game (1929; trans. 1955); and his first film, Le Sang d'un Poète (Blood of a Poet, 1930).

Cocteau's films, most of which he both wrote and directed, were especially important in introducing Surrealism into the French cinema. Several of them—particularly La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1945), Orphée (Orpheus, 1950), and Les Enfants Terribles (1950)—have come to be regarded as modern film classics.

Despite his achievements in virtually all literary and artistic fields, Cocteau insisted that he was primarily a poet and that all his work was poetry. He died at Milly-la-Fôret, near Fontainebleau, on October 11, 1963.