Jean Anouilh Biography and List of Works

French playwright, who achieved international fame with his plays within the play and bringing poetry and imagination to the stage. Anouilh partly adopted Sartre's existentialist views and was also influenced by the way Louis Jouvet and Jean Giraudoux created theatre. Anouilh hated publicity, and remained reclusive all his life.

Anouilh was born in Bordeaux. His father was a tailor and mother a violinist. After completing his early schooling, Anouilh studied law for a short time at the Sorbonne, and worked then as a copywriter at Publicité Damour, and also wrote comic scenes for the cinema. However, he had started playwriting already at the age of 12 and 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 twenty-five Anouilh decided to devote himself entirely to writing. During the next years Anouilh 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). Its hero is an amnesiac who, discovering that he had been a vile young man, discards his old self. Since then a new Anouilh play was seen in Paris almost every season.

Anouilh's early works were realistic and naturalistic studies of a sordid and corrupt world. Under the influence of such writers as Giraudoux, Cocteau, and Vitrac, Anouilh found a new way into writing. Also classical French theatre and the Italian dramatist Pirandello shaped his work. He used often the theatre as the setting of his plays and balanced between farce and seriousness.

During World War II Anoulh's LÉOCADIA (1940) became a hit. The lyrical fantasy depicted a prince whose love, Léocadia, has died but who finds a new love in a young milliner who resembles her. 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. In the play the heroine rejects the authoritarian King Creon and chooses death. The playwright's own wife had a personal triumph in the main role.

After the war Anouilh was the most successful playwright in Europe and fared best in the United States with the 'costumed' plays to which he turned in the 1950s, among them L'ALOUETTE (1953), about Joan of Arc, and BECKET (1959), which won a Tony Award and was filmed with Peter O'Toole as Henry Plantagenet and Richard Burton as Thomas à Becket. LA VALSE DES TORÉADORS (1952) was an international hit. Its hero, General Saint Pé, appeared in several plays as a caricature of the author.

"And under this carnival disguise the heart of an old youngster who is still waiting to give his all. But how to be recognized under this mask? This is what they call a fine career."
(from The Waltz of the Toreadors, 1952)

By the end of the 1950s Anouilh's works began to lose their critical favour with the theatrical newcomers with the emergence of such playwrights as Ionesco and Beckett. He did not write for a while and then resumed with plays fully endorsing the bourgeois values he had once despised. In the 1980s Anouilh directed some of his own plays as well as those of other authors. He died in Lausanne, Switzerland on October 3, 1987.

Anouilh's central themes are the impossibility for purity to survive and loss of innocence in a world dominated by compromise, money, and the search for happiness. His protagonists are often doomed to failure, but their struggle is touching.

Anouilh also translated and adapted works from such authors as Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and Graham Greene. Since 1936 Anouilh collaborated on the screenplays of several films, directed two, and also wrote ballets. Among his film scenarios are MONSIEUR VINCENT (1947), and Little Molière (1959), which depicted the unhappy relations between the writer and his wife. Divorced from Monelle Valentin, he was survived by his second wife, Nicole Lançon, and four children.

For further reading: Jean Anouilh: Life, Work and Criticism by C.N. Smith (1985): Interpreting Events by P. Hernadi (1985); The Theatre of Jean Anouilh by H.G. McIntyre (1981); Jean Anouilh by L.W. Falb (1979); Jean Anouilh by M. Archer (1971); Jean Anouilh by A.M. Della Frazia (1969); Le théâtre de Jean Anouilh by P. Jolivet (1961); The World of Jean Anouilh by L.C. Pronko (1961); Jean Anouilh by R. Luppé (1959); Jean Anouilh by H. Gignoux (1946) - Note: Anouilh's daughter Catherine Anouilh is a stage and screen actress.

L'HERMINE, (1931)
JEZABEL, (1932)
L'HERMINE, (1932)
LA MANDARINE, (1933)
LA SAUVAGE, (1934)
Y AVAIT UN PRISONNIER, (1935)
LE VOYAGEUR SANS BAGAGE, (1937)
LE RENDEZ-VOUS DE SENLIS, (1937)
LE BAL DES VOLEURS, (1938)
LA SAUVAGE, (1938)
LÉOCADIA, (1940)
EYRYDICE, (1942)
ANTIGONE, (1944)
ROMÉO AT JEANNETTE, (1946)
MÉDÉE, (1946)
L'INVITATION AU CHÂTEAU, (1947)
MONSIEUR VINCENT, (1947)
ARDÈLE, OU LA MARGUERITE, (1948)
CÉCILE, OU L'ÉCOLE DES PÈRES, (1949)
LA RÉPÉTITION, (1950)
COLOMBE, (1951)
LA VALSE DES TORÉADORS, (1952)
L'ALOUETTE, (1953)
CÉCILE, (1954)
ORNIFLE, OU LE COURANT D'AIR, (1955)
PAUVRE BITOS, OU LE DÍNER DE TÊTES, (1956)
L'HURLUBERLU, OU LE RÈACTIONNAIRE AMOUREUX, (1959)
ORESTE, (1959)
LA PETITE MOLIÈRE, (1959)
BECKET, OU L'HONNEUR DE DIEU, (1959)
LE SONGE DU CRITIQUE, (1960)
L'ORCHESTRE, (1962)
LA GROTTE, (1961)
LA FOIRE D'EMPOIGNE, (1962)
LE BOULANGER, LA BOULANGÈRE ET LE PETIT MITRON, (1964)
CHER ANTOINE, (1969)
NE RÉVEILLEZ PAS MADAME, (1970)
LES POISSONS ROUGE, (1970)
LE DIRECTEUR DE L'OPÉRA, (1972)
TU ÉTAIS SI GENTIL GUAND TU ÉTAIS PETIT, (1972)
MONSIEUR BARNETT, (1974)
L'ARRESTATION, (1975)
LE SCÉNARIO, (1976)
CHERS ZOISEAUX, (1976)
VIVE HENRI IV, (1978)
LA CULOTTE, (1978)
LE NOMBRIL, (1981)
JEAN ANOUILH: Five Plays, (1993)