Jean Anouilh
| Jean Anouilh | |
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| Born |
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh 23 June 1910 Bordeaux, France |
| Died | 3 October 1987 (aged 77) Lausanne, Switzerland |
| Occupation | Dramatist, Screenwriter |
| Nationality | French |
| Literary movement | Modernism |
| Notable works |
The Lark Becket Traveler without Luggage Antigone |
| Notable awards | Prix mondial Cino Del Duca |
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Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh (French: [anuj]; 23 June 1910 – 3 October 1987) was a French dramatist whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1943 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's Vichy government. One of France's most prolific writers after World War II, much of Anouilh's work deals with themes of maintaining integrity in a world of moral compromise.
Anouilh was born in Cérisole, a small village on the outskirts of Bordeaux, and had Basque ancestry. His father, François Anouilh, was a tailor and Anouilh maintained that he inherited from him a pride in conscientious craftmanship. He may owe his artistic bent to his mother, Marie-Magdeleine, a violinist who supplemented the family's meager income by playing summer seasons in the casino orchestra in the nearby seaside resort of Arcachon. Marie-Magdeleine worked the night shifts in the music-hall orchestras and sometimes accompanied stage presentations, affording Anouilh ample opportunity to absorb the dramatic performances from backstage. He often attended rehearsals and solicited the resident authors to let him read scripts until bedtime. He first tried his hand at playwriting here, at the age of 12, though his earliest works do not survive.
The family moved into Paris in 1918 where the young Anouilh received his secondary education at the Lycée Chaptal. Jean-Louis Barrault, later a major French director, was a pupil there at the same time and recalls Anouilh as an intense, rather dandified figure who hardly noticed a boy some two years younger than himself. He earned acceptance into the law school at the Sorbonne but, unable to support himself financially, he left after just 18 months to seek work as a copywriter at Publicité Damour. He liked the work and spoke more than once with wry approval of the lessons in the classical virtues of brevity and precision of language he learned while drafting advertising copy.
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