
Jean Anouilh
Writing
🎂 1910-06-23
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh (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 1944 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's Vichy government. His plays are less experimental than those of his contemporaries, having clearly organized plot and eloquent dialogue. 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. In 1918 the family moved to Paris 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 the advertising agency 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. ... Source: Article "Jean Anouilh" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Cast credits(2)
Writing (45)

Theatre Play
1964

Dialogue
1978

Scenario Writer
1978

Writer
1951

Theatre Play
1964

Writer
1948

Writer
1947

Screenplay
1964

Writer
1972

Screenplay
1937

Theatre Play
1962

Theatre Play
2012

Writer
1961

Dialogue
1937
Writer
1957

Writer
1979

Original Story
1979

Screenplay
1943

Writer
2003

Writer
1953

Dialogue
1951

Dialogue
1939

Screenplay
1945

Dialogue
1952

Writer
1944

Screenplay
1965

Screenplay
1939

Theatre Play
1952

Author
2003

Writer
2008

Scenario Writer
1949

Writer
1973

Writer
1981

Writer
1958
Screenplay
1961
Book
2004
Writer
1972

Author
1986

Writer
1974
Theatre Play
1972

Writer
1968
Writer
1957
Theatre Play
1968
Theatre Play
1964
Theatre Play
1966