Cocteau, Jean (zhäN kôktō`), 1889–1963, French writer, visual artist, and filmmaker. He experimented audaciously in almost every artistic medium, becoming a leader of the French avant-garde in the 1920s. His first great success was the novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929), which he made into a film in 1950. Surrealistic fantasy suffuses his films and many of his novels and plays. Among his best dramatic works are Orphée (1926) and La Machine infernale (1934, tr. 1936), in which the Orpheus and Oedipus myths are surrealistically adapted to modern circumstances. His films include The Blood of a Poet (1933), Beauty and the Beast (1946), and Orphée (1949). Among other works are ballets, sketches, monologues, whimsical drawings, and the text (written with Stravinsky) for the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927).

Bibliography

See his autobiography; comp. from his writings by R. Phelps (tr. 1970); biographies by F. Brown (1968), E. Sprigge and J.-J. Kihm (1968), and F. Steegmuller (1970); M. Crosland, ed., Cocteau's World (tr. 1972).

Cocteau, Jean

Cocteau, 1939.

(credit: Gisèle Freund)

(born July 5, 1889, Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris, France—died Oct. 11, 1963, Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris) French poet, playwright, and film director. He published his first collection of poems, La Lampe d'Aladin, at age 19. He converted to Catholicism early but soon renounced religion. During World War I he was an ambulance driver on the Belgian front, the setting for the novel Thomas l'imposteur (1923). In the years when he was addicted to opium, he produced some of his most important works, including the play Orphée (1926) and the novel Les Enfants terribles (1929). His greatest play is thought to be The Infernal Machine (1934). His first film was The Blood of a Poet (1930); he returned to filmmaking in the 1940s, first as a screenwriter and then as a director, and made such admired films as Beauty and the Beast (1945), Orphée (1949), and Le Testament d'Orphée (1960). Musically, Cocteau was closely associated with the group of composers known as Les Six; among other collaborations, he provided ballet scenarios for Erik Satie (Parade, 1917) and Darius Milhaud (Le Boeuf sur le toit, 1920) and wrote librettos for Igor Stravinsky (Oedipus, 1927) and Milhaud (La Voix humaine, 1930). Also an artist, he illustrated numerous books with his vivid drawings, and he worked as a designer as well.