Anecdotes

He was an ambulance driver during the First World War.

Longtime companion of Jean Marais.

When Jean Cocteau was asked who had the greatest influence on him, he replied, "Harry Langdon.".

President of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1954.

Honorary president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957.

President of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953.

Was posthumously nominated for Broadway's 1995 Tony Award as author of Best Play nominee "Indiscretions."

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945." Pages 144-147. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Though his body of work encompassed many different mediums, Cocteau insisted on calling himself a poet, classifying the great variety of his works - poems, novels, plays, essays, drawings, films - as "poésie", "poésie de roman", "poésie de thêatre", "poésie critique", "poésie graphique" and "poésie cinématographique".

His final film, Le Testament d'Orphée (The Testament of Orpheus) (1960), featured appearances by Picasso and matador Luis Miguel Dominguín, along with Yul Brynner, who also helped finance the film.

In 1956, Cocteau decorated the Chapelle Saint-Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer with mural paintings. The following year he also decorated the marriage hall at the Hôtel de Ville in Menton.

In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent, Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf (who died the day before Cocteau), was enormously successful.

In the 1930s, Cocteau is rumoured to have had a very brief affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the daughter of a Romanov Grand Duke and herself a sometime actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong.

His 1934 play La Machine infernale was Cocteau's stage version of the Oedipus legend and is considered to be his greatest work for the theater.

He was one of the foremost artists of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements and an influential figure in early 20th century art. The National Observer suggested that, "of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man.".

In 1930 Cocteau made his first film The Blood of a Poet, publicly shown in 1932. Though now generally accepted as a surrealist film, the surrealists themselves did not accept it as a truly surrealist work. Although this is one of Cocteau's best known works, his 1930s are notable rather for a number of stage plays, above all La Voix humaine and Les Parents terribles, which was a popular success.

During the Nazi occupation of France, he was in a "round-table" of French and German intellectuals who met at the Georges V Hotel in Paris, including Cocteau, the writers Ernst Jünger, Paul Morand and Henry Millon de Montherlant, the publisher Gaston Gallimard and the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt.

Cocteau wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, which had its original performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on 30 May 1927.

His best known films include Beauty and the Beast (1946), Les Parents terribles (1948), and Orpheus (1949).

Jean Cocteau was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist and critic.

An important exponent of avant-garde art, Cocteau had great influence on the work of others, including a group of composers known as Les six. In the early twenties, he and other members of Les six frequented a wildly popular bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a name that Cocteau himself had a hand in picking. The popularity was due in no small measure to the presence of Cocteau and his friends.

In 1929 one of his most celebrated and well known works, the novel Les Enfants terribles was published.

In 1955, Cocteau was made a member of the Académie Française and The Royal Academy of Belgium.

He published his first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen. Cocteau soon became known in Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, the title of a volume he published at twenty-two.

From 1900 to 1904, Cocteau attended the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a relationship with schoolmate Pierre Dargelos, who reappeared throughout Cocteau's work, "Jean Cocteau: Erotic Drawings.".

Jean Cocteau never hid his bisexuality. He was the author of the mildly homoerotic and semi-autobiographical Le Livre blanc (translated as The White Paper or The White Book), published anonymously in 1928.