Biography
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, France, to a prominent bourgeois family. Fascinated with the arts, Cocteau launched his career in 1908 with a reading from his first volume of poetry, Aladdin’s Lamp. He found fame through the controversial avant-garde 1917 ballet Parade: produced by the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, it was conceived by Cocteau, had backdrops and costumes by Picasso, music by Satie, and programme notes by Apollinaire. Despite receiving scathing criticism, it is believed to be the first work described as ‘surrealist’.
From 1924 to 1929 Cocteau was addicted to opium, which affected his entire philosophy, lifestyle and art. During this period he wrote much of the foundation of his future work, including the play Orphée and the novel Les Enfants Terribles. In 1929, at the age of 40, he made his first film, Le Sang d'un Poète (The Blood of a Poet)—with its arresting visuals and coming immediately after Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, it is considered one of only a clutch of true surrealist cinema.
Cocteau did not work on film again for 16 years, and by that time he was less controversial and an established literary figure. After writing film dialogue for others (including Robert Bresson), Cocteau directed his first narrative feature in 1946, La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast). In this film, based on the Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s fairy tale, he altered the more experimental style of his first film, adapting the story in a simple manner while still creating some of cinema’s most famously imaginative imagery.
After directing films of his plays L'Aigle à Deux Têtes and Les Parents Terribles (both 1948), Cocteau collaborated with director Jean-Pierre Melville on the adaptation of his novel Les Enfants Terribles. More importantly, 1950 also saw Cocteau’s film of Orphée, often said to sum up his life and work, successfully fusing his fascinations with mythology, melodrama and fantasy. After this, he did not make another film for years, living a celebrity’s life of painting and writing. In 1959 he began his final film, Le Testament d'Orphée (1960), where he appeared as himself journeying through the spaces of his imagination and his previous work, visited by real-life friends and characters from the earlier Orphée. He died three years later at the age of 74.
