Jean Anouilh

Jean Anouilh (1910-1987) was born in Bordeaux on June 23, 1910. After completing his early schooling, Anouilh studied law for a short time at the Sorbonne, and then worked as a copywriter at Publicité Damour. He also wrote comic scenes for the cinema. In 1929, he collaborated with Jean Aurenche on his first play, Humulus Le Muet. It was followed in the same year by Mandarine. In 1931, Anouilh married the actress Monelle Valentin and became secretary to Louis Jouvet's Comédie des Champs-Élysées.

At the age of 25, Anouilh decided to devote himself entirely to writing. He completed several plays and gained comparative success with the production of Y Avait un Prisonnier (1935) before his breakthrough work Le Voyageur Sans Bagage (1937). After that, a new Anouilh play was seen in Paris almost every season.

During World War II, Anouilh's Léocadia (1940) became a hit. The lyrical fantasy depicted a prince who finds new love in a young milliner who resembles his deceased lover. In 1944, he gained a wide audience with Antigone, a version of Sophocles’ classical drama, because of its thinly disguised attack on the Nazis and on the Vichy government.

After the war, Anouilh was the most successful playwright in Europe. Likewise, he enjoyed much fame in the United States with his “costumed“ plays – plays that mixed reality with illusion and were presented as improvisations – to which he turned in the 1950s. Among them are L’alouette (1953, aka The Lark), about Joan of Arc, which was staged in New York at Longacre Theatre in 1955; Becket (1959), which won a Tony Award; and La Valse des Toréadors (1952), whose hero, General Saint Pé, appeared in several plays as a caricature of the author. Anouilh dealt with his clash with General de Gaulle in L’hurluberlu (1958) and Le Songe du Critique (1960). Over time, his works began to lose their critical favor with the emergence of such playwrights as Ionesco and Beckett.

After pausing his writing for a while, Anouilh returned with plays that were marked by conservative attitudes and a principal character longing for the past. These works include La Culotte (1978), which addresses women’s liberation. In the 1980s, Anouilh directed productions of his plays and those of other authors. He died in Lausanne, Switzerland on October 3, 1987.