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Prolific French playwright, whose works ranged from high drama to absurdist farce. Anouilh's career spanned over five decades. Although he cannot be linked with any particular school or trend, he partly adopted Sartre's existentialist views and was also influenced by the way Louis Jouvet and Jean Giraudoux created theater. Anouilh hated publicity, and remained reclusive all his life. Often his unsuccessful protagonist, idealistic and intransigent, is in conflict with the world of compromise and corruption.
'"Thanks to Molière," wrote Jean Anouilh, "the true French theatre is the only one that is not gloomy, in which we laugh like men at war with out misery and our horror. This humor is one of France's messages to the world." And continuing in the tradition of his acknowledged master, Anouilh offers a body of work in which even his most tragic plays are informed by the humor essential to Molière and the linguistic elegance that was polished to perfection by Marivaux, Musset, and Giraudoux. The result is often a mixing of genres that critics seem willing enough to accept in Shakespeare but find offensive or disturbing in Anouilh. But Anouilh undoubtedly has few contemporary peers in his mastery of stagecraft.' (Joseph E. Garreau in McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, vol.1, ed. by Stanley Hochman, 1983)
Jean Anouilh was born in Bordeaux. His father was a tailor and mother a violinist, who played in the orchestra of a casino near Bordeaux. After completing his early schooling, Anouilh studied law for a short time at the Sorbonne, and worked then as a copywriter at Publicité Damour. He also wrote comic scenes for the cinema. However, he had started playwriting already at the age of 12 and in 1929 he collaborated with Jean Aurenche on his first play, HUMULUS LE MUET. It was followed in the same year by MANDARINE. In 1931 Anouilh married the actress Monelle Valentin and became secretary to Louis Jouvet's Comédie des Champs-Élysées.
At the age of twenty-five Anouilh decided to devote himself entirely to writing. During the next years Anouilh completed several plays and gained comparative success with the production of Y AVAIT UN PRISONNIER (1935) before his breakthrough work LE VOYAGEUR SANS BAGAGE (1937). Its hero is an amnesiac who, discovering that he had been a vile young man, discards his old self. Since then a new Anouilh play was seen in Paris almost every season.
Anouilh's early work were realistic and naturalistic studies of a sordid and corrupt world. Under the influence of such writers as Giraudoux, Cocteau, and Vitrac, Anouilh found a new view into writing. Also classical French theater and the Italian dramatist Pirandello shaped his work. He used often the theater as the setting of his plays and balanced between farce and seriousness. Later Anouilh grouped his plays under adjectives descriptive of their dominant tone: "black" (tragedies, realistic plays), "pink" (fantasy dominates), "brilliant" (combination of pink and black plays in aristocratic environments), "jarring" (black plays with bitter humor), "costumed" (with historical characters), "baroque," and mes fours (my failures). These adjectives occurred in the titles of each of his collections of plays.
During World War II Anouilh's LÉOCADIA (1940) became a hit. The lyrical fantasy depicted a prince whose love, Léocadia, has died but who finds a new love in a young milliner who resembles her. In 1944 he gained a wide audience with ANTIGONE, a version of Sophocles' classical drama, because of its thinly disguised attack on the Nazis and on the Vichy government. In the play the heroine rejects the authoritarian King Creon and chooses death. The playwright's own wife had a personal triumph in the main role. "ANTIGONE: Vous me dégoûtez tous avec votre bonheur! Avec votre vie qu'il faut aimer coûte que coûte. On dirait des chiens qui lèchent tout ce qu'ils trouvent. Et cette petite chance pour tous les jours, si on n'est pas trop exigeant. Moi, je veux tout, tout de suite, - et que ce soit entier - ou alors je refuse! Je ne veux pas être modeste, moi, et me contenter d'un petit morceau si j'ai été bien sage. Je veux être sûre de tout aujourd'hui et que cela soit aussi beau que quand j'étais petite - ou mourir. (from Antigone)
After the war Anouilh was the most successful playwright in Europe. In the United States he enjoyed fame with the "costumed" plays to which he turned in the 1950s, among them L'ALOUETTE (1953, The Lark), about Joan of Arc. It was staged in New York at Longacre Theatre in 1955, starring Julie Harris. BECKET (1959), which won a Tony Award, was filmed with Peter O'Toole as Henry Plantagenet and Richard Burton as Thomas à Becket. LA VALSE DES TORÉADORS (1952) also became an international hit. Its hero, General Saint Pé, appeared in several plays as a caricature of the author. Often his "costumed" plays mixed reality with illusion and were presented as improvisations.
"And under this carnival disguise the heart of an old youngster who is still waiting to give his all. But how to be recognized under this mask? This is what they call a fine career." (from The Waltz of the Toreadors, 1952)
In the 1950s Anouilh dealt his clash with General de Gaulle in L'HURLUBERLU (1958) and LE SONGE DU CRITIQUE (1960). His works began to lose their critical favor with the emergence of such playwrights as Ionesco and Beckett. He did not write for a while. He then returned with plays which were marked with conservative attitudes and in which his principal character longs for the past. These works include LA CULOTTE (1978), in which the theme was women's liberation. In the 1980s Anouilh directed some of his own plays as well as those of other authors. He died in Lausanne, Switzerland on October 3, 1987.
Anouilh also translated and adapted works from such authors as Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and Graham Greene. Since 1936 Anouilh collaborated on the screenplays of several films, directed two, and also wrote ballets. Among his film scenarios are MONSIEUR VINCENT (1947), and Little Molière (1959), which depicted the unhappy relationship between the writer and his wife. Divorced from Monelle Valentin, he was survived by his second wife, Nicole Lançon, and four children.
For further reading: Jean Anouilh: Life, Work and Criticism by C.N. Smith (1985): Interpreting Events by P. Hernadi (1985); The Theatre of Jean Anouilh by H.G. McIntyre (1981); Jean Anouilh by L.W. Falb (1979); Jean Anouilh by M. Archer (1971); Jean Anouilh by A.M. Della Fazia (1969); Le théâtre de Jean Anouilh by P. Jolivet (1961); The World of Jean Anouilh by L.C. Pronko (1961); Jean Anouilh by R. Luppé (1959); Jean Anouilh by H. Gignoux (1946) - Note: Anouilh's daughter Catherine Anouilh is a stage and screen actress. - Muita suomenoksia: Medeia, 1951-52; Eyridike, 1957, suom. Katri Ingman