Jean Cocteau called everything he made poetry, including his films
Novelist, playwright, painter, ballet writer and film director, Jean Cocteau refused every label but one. He sorted his output into poetry of the novel, of the theatre, of drawing and of cinema. He also wrote his best-known book, Les Enfants Terribles, in a single week while coming off opium.
Cocteau was born on 5 July 1889 in Maisons-Laffitte into a well-connected Parisian family. His father, a lawyer who painted as a hobby, took his own life when Jean was nine. At the Lycée Condorcet he fell for a classmate, Pierre Dargelos, a figure who keeps resurfacing in his art. He left home at fifteen, published a first book of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen, and was soon nicknamed The Frivolous Prince after another collection.
His circle grew fast. In his early twenties he knew Proust and Gide, and in 1912 he worked with Léon Bakst on a Ballets Russes production danced by Nijinsky. Driving ambulances for the Red Cross in the First World War, he met Apollinaire, Picasso and Modigliani. Diaghilev then coaxed a ballet scenario out of him: Parade, staged in 1917 with Picasso's sets and Erik Satie's score. Cocteau joked that only the sight of the wounded Apollinaire in uniform stopped furious audience members from attacking them.
In 1918 he befriended the young poet Raymond Radiguet, helped him avoid military service and pushed his novel Le Diable au corps into print and onto a prize list. Whether Radiguet's sudden death in 1923 drove Cocteau into opium is disputed: some say it devastated him, others note he skipped the funeral, as he did most funerals, and left for Monte Carlo with Diaghilev. Cocteau himself blamed a chance meeting with an opera administrator for the habit.
His 1929 cure produced Opium: Diary of a Cure, illustrated with his own pen drawings, and a brief return to Catholicism under the philosopher Jacques Maritain. On screen he made Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus, part of a loose Orphic Trilogy. He influenced the composers known as Les Six and helped name their favourite bar, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. He died on 11 October 1963.
Source: Jean Cocteau
