Early years

Anouilh was born in Cérisole, a small village on the outskirts of Bordeaux and had Basque ancestry. His father 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, a violinist who supplemented the family's meager income by playing summer seasons in the casino orchestra in the nearby seaside resort of Arcachon.

He attended école primaire supérieure where he received his secondary education at the Collège 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. Anouilh enrolled as a law student in the University of Paris, only to abandon the course after just eighteen months when he found employment in the advertising industry. 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 copy. Overall, he has written thirty plays which have been recognised and performed worldwide.

Career

In 1932, his first play, L’Hermine, written in 1929, was unsuccessful, but he followed it up with a string of others. He struggled through years of poverty producing several plays until he eventually wound up as secretary to the great actor-director Louis Jouvet. He quickly discovered he could not get along with this gruff man and left his company.

During the Nazi occupation of France, Anouilh did not openly take sides, though he published the play Antigone, adapted from the classical work of Sophocles which is often viewed as his most famous work. The play criticises - in an allegorical manner - collaborationism with the Nazis. Mostly keeping aloof from politics, Anouilh also clashed with de Gaulle in the 1950s.

In 1964, Anouilh's play Becket ou l'honneur de Dieu (Becket or The Honor of God) was made into a successful film, starring Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. The screenwriter who adapted it, Edward Anhalt, won an Academy Award for his screenplay.

Anouilh himself grouped his plays on the basis of their dominant tone: "black" (tragedies and realistic plays), "pink" (where fantasy dominates), "brilliant" ('pink' and 'black' combined in aristocratic environments), "jarring" ('black' plays with bitter humour), "costumed" (historical characters feature), "baroque", and my failures (mes fours).

In 1970 his work was recognized with the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.

Private life

Anouilh married actress Monelle Valentin in 1931. In 1953, he married his second wife, Nicole Lançon, who survived him at his death on 3 October 1987.

In many of his plays, Jean Anouilh presents his reader with a striking and ineluctable dichotomy between idealism and realism. Pucciani tells us that "in Anouilh, no middle ground of ambiguity exists where this conflict is resolved." This can be seen in his play Le Voyageur Sans Bagage, where the main character Gaston, is a World War I veteran who suffers from amnesia. He does not remember his past that was filled with his moral depravity (he slept with his brother's wife and severely injured his best friend, among examples). This moral depravity is invariably at odds with the extreme purity that he now exhibits and is the antithesis of his past. In another play L'Hermine, the main character finds himself in a world hostile to his romantic idealism. In L'Hermine, love is made to fight an inexorable and futile battle against money, social status, ambition, and lax morals.

This is the essence of what Jean Anouilh offers us: a battle between idealism and realism - a man, a hopeless romantic, is locked in a perpetual battle against a society that is hostile to his purity. In his Pièces Roses, the protagonist finds a compromise. Not an ideal one, but an acceptable accommodation with which he can live his life. But in Anouilh's 'Pièces Noires', the battle is lost from the beginning and the character is doomed to a harrowing fate.