1. Jean Anouilh's plays are less experimental than those of his contemporaries, having clearly organized plot and eloquent dialogue.
24 Facts About Jean Anouilh
1. 2.
Jean Anouilh was born in Cerisole, a small village on the outskirts of Bordeaux, France and had Basque ancestry.
3.
Jean Anouilh's father, Francois Anouilh, was a tailor, and Anouilh maintained that he inherited from him a pride in conscientious craftmanship.
4.
Jean Anouilh often attended rehearsals and solicited the resident authors to let him read scripts until bedtime.
5.
Jean Anouilh first tried his hand at playwriting here, at the age of 12, though his earliest works do not survive.
6.
In 1918 the family moved to Paris where the young Jean Anouilh received his secondary education at the Lycee Chaptal.
7.
Jean Anouilh earned acceptance into the law school at the Sorbonne but, unable to support himself financially, he left after just 18 months to seek work as a copywriter at the advertising agency Publicite Damour.
8.
Jean Anouilh 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 advertising copy.
9.
Jean Anouilh allegedly had multiple extramarital affairs, which caused Anouilh much pain and suffering.
10.
Jean Anouilh's growing family placed further strain on his already limited finances.
11.
At the age of 25, Jean Anouilh found work as a secretary to the French actor and director Louis Jouvet at the Comedie des Champs-Elysees.
12.
The plays were not great successes, closing after 37 and 13 performances respectively, but Jean Anouilh persevered, following it up with a string of productions, most notably Y'avait un prisonnier.
13.
Barsacq was a champion for Jean Anouilh and their affiliation was a major factor in the playwright's continued success after the war.
14.
Jean Anouilh's work had always contained hints of metatheatricality, or commentary on the business of theatre within the world of the play, but in his late works these structures became more fully developed as he begins to write primarily about characters who are dramatists or theatre directors.
15.
Antoine, the playwright-protagonist of Cher Antoine; ou, L'Amour rate, asserts that the world must take notice of these pieces secretes and Jean Anouilh scholars have proposed this name, pieces secretes, to classify the collected works of his latest period.
16.
Jean Anouilh remained staunchly apolitical for most of his life and career.
17.
Jean Anouilh served in the military during at least two periods, having been drafted into the French Army in 1931 and 1939.
18.
Jean Anouilh was a prisoner of war for a short time when the Germans conquered France and willingly lived and worked in Paris during the subsequent German occupation.
19.
In 2012, the Nobel Records were opened after 50 years and it was revealed that Jean Anouilh was among a shortlist of authors considered for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, along with John Steinbeck, Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell and Karen Blixen.
20.
In 1980, Jean Anouilh was the first recipient of the Grand Prix du Theatre de l'Academie francaise established that year.
21.
Jean Anouilh befriends a young English boy and shows him his identifying scar; this gesture allows the boy to describe Gaston to the authorities, thereby claiming him as kin.
22.
Jean Anouilh disagreed with these somber readings of his best works arguing that, like all great French literature, his plays had found ways to laugh at misfortune.
23.
Jean Anouilh began to lose the favor of audiences and critics alike with the emergence of such playwrights as Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.
24.
Jean Anouilh died of a heart attack in Lausanne, Switzerland on 3 October 1987.