"A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it." -- Jean Anouilh
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh (; 23 June 1910 — 3 October 1987) was a French dramatist best known for his play Antigone, an adaptation of a Sophocles drama to attack Pétain's Vichy government.
"A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.""All evil comes from the old.They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.""An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.""Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed.""Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.""Every man thinks god is on his side.""God is on everyone's side... and in the last analysis, he is on the side with plenty of money and large armies.""Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?""I like reality. It tastes like bread.""Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.""It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness to be truly base.""Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.""Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.""Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.""Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.""Men create real miracles when they use their God-given courage and intelligence.""Nothing is irreparable in politics.""Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy - and that is life.""One cannot weep for the entire world, it is beyond human strength. One must choose.""Our entire life - consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.""Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.""Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path.""Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.""The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.""There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.""Things are beautiful if you love them.""To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.""Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.""Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage.""We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down.""What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating.""What you get free costs too much.""When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.""With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil."
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.
1973 - Pices Grinantes["Ardele, ou la Marguerite"; "La Valse des Toreadors"; "Ornifle, ou le courant d'air" & "Pauvre Bitos, ou le diner de tetes"](Hardcover)