Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, playwright, designer, and filmmaker whose work crossed nearly every artistic medium of the early and mid-twentieth century. He was born Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau on July 5, 1889, in Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris, and died on October 11, 1963, in Milly-la-Forêt, France.

Cocteau grew up in a cultivated Parisian family; his father, a lawyer and amateur painter, died by suicide when Cocteau was nine. He published his first poetry collection, La Lampe d'Aladin, at nineteen and quickly entered the Paris avant-garde, collaborating with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes on the 1917 ballet Parade, with sets by Pablo Picasso and music by Erik Satie.

His 1929 novel Les Enfants terribles, written during a detoxification cure for opium addiction, traced the closed inner world of a brother and sister and remains his best-known prose work. He also wrote the plays Orphée and La Machine infernale and the long essay Le Rappel à l'ordre.

From the 1930s he turned to cinema. Le Sang d'un poète (1930), La Belle et la Bête (1946), and Orphée (1950) used dream imagery, mirrors, and reverse motion to explore poetry, love, and death. He was elected to the Académie française in 1955. His long companions included the actors Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, the latter of whom he adopted as his heir.

The given name Jean is the French form of John, from the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning God is gracious. As a masculine name it has been one of the most common in France for centuries; he used it throughout his life.