• 1955 in film
• 1959 in poetry
• Abortion
• Académie française
• Adolf Hitler
• Amedeo Modigliani
• André Breton
• André Gide
• Anna Magnani
• Antigone (Cocteau)
• Antoine Furetière
• Apollinaire
• Arno Breker
• Arthur Honegger
• Artist
• Avant-garde art
• Bacchus (play)
• Ballet
• Ballets Russes
• Barbette (performer)
• Berthe Bovy
• Blood of a Poet
• Bohemianism
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• Chateau
• Cinema of France
• Coco Chanel
• Colette
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• E. E. Cummings
• Edith Piaf
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• Erik Satie
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• 
  

• 
  Cannes film festival
  The Cannes International Film Festival (French: Le Festival International du Film de Cannes or just Festival de Cannes), is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is the world's most prestigious and publicized film festival. The invitation-only festival is held annually (usually in May) at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès.
  The 2012 Cannes Film Festival took place from May 16 to May 27, 2012. The President of the Jury was the Italian film director Nanni Moretti.
  The Cannes Film Festival has its origins in the late 1930s when Jean Zay, the French Minister of National Education, on the proposal of Philippe Erlanger and with the support of the British and Americans,^{[clarification needed]} set up an international cinematographic festival. In 1947, the festival was held as the "Festival du film de Cannes", where films from sixteen countries were presented. Moreover, the principle of equality was introduced, so that the jury was to be made up only of one representative per country. Also, this year the festival was held at the made-for-the-occasion Palais des Festivals, although the roof was unfinished and blew off during a storm. The festival was not held in 1948 and 1950 on account of budgetary problems. In 1951, owing to better relations between France and Italy, the Cannes Festival was moved to Spring, while the Mostra remained in Autumn.
  
  wn.com/Cannes_film_festival
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  Essonne
  Essonne (pronounced: [ɛ.sɔn]) is a French department in the region of Île-de-France. It is named after the Essonne River.
  It was formed on 1 January 1968 when Seine-et-Oise was split into smaller departments.
  The Essonne department was created on 1 January 1968, from the southern portion of the former department of Seine-et-Oise.
  In June 1963 Carrefour S.A. opened the first hypermarket in the Paris region at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois (although the word "hypermarche" was first used only in 1966). Based on the ideas put forward by the American logistics pioneer Bernardo Trujillo, the centre offered on a single 2,500 m² (26,909.78 sq ft) site a hitherto unknown combination of wide choice and low prices, supported by 400 car parking spaces.
  In 1969, the communes of Châteaufort and Toussus-le-Noble were separated from Essonne and added to the department of Yvelines.
  Essonne belongs to the region of Île-de-France.
  It has borders with the departments of:
  All of northern Essonne department belongs to the Parisian agglomeration and is very urbanized. The south remains rural.
  
  wn.com/Essonne
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  France
  France (English ⁱ/ˈfræns/ FRANSS or /ˈfrɑːns/ FRAHNSS; French: [fʁɑ̃s] ( listen)), officially the French Republic (French: République française [ʁepyblik fʁɑ̃sɛz]), is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is often referred to as l’Hexagone ("The Hexagon") because of the geometric shape of its territory. It is the largest western European country and it possesses the second-largest exclusive economic zone in the world, covering 11,035,000 km² (4,260,000 sq mi), just behind that of the United States (11,351,000 km² / 4,383,000 sq mi).
  Over the past 500 years, France has been a major power with strong cultural, economic, military and political influence in Europe and around the world. During the 17th and 18th centuries, France colonised great parts of North America and Southeast Asia; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, France built the second largest colonial empire of the time, including large portions of North, West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and many Caribbean and Pacific Islands.
  
  wn.com/France
• 
  Metz
  Metz (French pronunciation: [mɛs] ( listen); German: [ˈmɛts]) is a city in the northeast of France located at the confluence of the Moselle and the Seille rivers.
  Metz is the capital of the Lorraine region and prefecture of the Moselle department. Located near the tripoint along the junction of France, Germany, and Luxembourg, Metz forms a central place of the European Greater Region and of the SaarLorLux Euroregion. So, Metz is a fellow member of the QuattroPole union of cities, along with Luxembourg City and German Saarbrücken and Trier.
  A Celtic oppidum, an important Gallo-Roman city, the Merovingian capital of the Austrasia kingdom, the birthplace of the Carolingian dynasty, a cradle of the Gregorian chant, and one of the oldest republics of the common era in Europe, Metz has a rich 3,000 year history. The city has been steeped in Romance culture, but has been strongly influenced by Germanic culture due to its location and history. A basin of urban ecology, pioneered under the leadership of people like Jean-Marie Pelt, Metz gained its nickname, The Green City, boasting over 37 m² (398 sq ft) of open ground per inhabitant and the city's historic downtown also displays one of the largest commercial, pedestrian areas in France.
  
  wn.com/Metz
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  Monte Carlo
  Monte Carlo (French: Monte-Carlo, Occitan: Montcarles, Monégasque: Monte-Carlu) is an administrative area of the Principality of Monaco.
  Monte Carlo is widely known for its casino and its prominence. The permanent population is about 15,000 in Quarter. Monte Carlo quarter includes not only Monte Carlo proper where the Le Grand Casino is located, it also includes the neighbourhoods of Saint-Michel, Saint-Roman/Tenao, and the beach community of Larvotto. It is also one of Monaco's 10 wards, with a population of 3,500. It borders the French town of Beausoleil (sometimes referred to as Monte-Carlo-Supérieur).
  The "Monte Carlo" name is of Italian origin, meaning "Mount Charles" named after the Prince Charles III of Monaco during the time of his reign.
  Founded in 1866, Monte Carlo has a name of Italian origin meaning "Mount Charles", in honor of the then-reigning prince, Charles III of Monaco. The specific mountain is the escarpment at the foot of the Maritime Alps on which the town stands.
  The history of the area and the ruling Grimaldi family, however, dates back centuries. The port of Monaco is first mentioned in historical records as early as 43 BC, when Julius Caesar concentrated his fleet there while waiting in vain for Pompey. In the 12th century, the area fell under the sovereignty of Genoa, which was granted the entire coastline from Porto Venere to Monaco. After much conflict, the Grimaldis regained the rock in 1295, but suffered a significant amount of opposition in the ensuing years. In 1506 the Monegasques, under Lucien, Lord of Monaco, were under siege for some four months by the Genoan army, which had ten times the number of men. Monaco officially received full autonomy in 1524, but experienced difficulty retaining power, and on occasions briefly fell under the domination of Spain, Sardinia, and France.
  
  wn.com/Monte_Carlo
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  Paris
  Coordinates: 48°51′24″N 2°21′03″E / 48.8567°N 2.3508°E / 48.8567; 2.3508
  Paris (ⁱ/ˈpærɨs/; French: [paʁi] ( listen)) is the capital and largest city of France. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region (or Paris Region, French: Région parisienne). As of January 2008 the city of Paris, within its administrative limits (the 20 arrondissements) largely unchanged since 1860, has an estimated population of 2,211,297 and a metropolitan population of 12,089,098, and is one of the most populated metropolitan areas in Europe. Paris was the largest city in the Western world for about 1,000 years, prior to the 19th century, and the largest in the entire world between the 16th and 19th centuries.
  Paris is today one of the world's leading business and cultural centres, and its influences in politics, education, entertainment, media, fashion, science, and the arts all contribute to its status as one of the world's major global cities. It hosts the headquarters of many international organizations such as UNESCO, the OECD, the International Chamber of Commerce or the European Space Agency. Paris is considered one of the greenest and most liveable cities in Europe. It is also one of the most expensive.
  
  wn.com/Paris
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  Yvelines
  Yvelines (French pronunciation: [ivlin]) is a French department in the region of Île-de-France.
  Yvelines was created from the western part of the defunct department of Seine-et-Oise on 1 January 1968 in accordance with a law passed on 10 January 1964 and a décret d'application (a decree specifying how a law should be enforced) from 26 February 1965.
  It gained the communes of Châteaufort and Toussus-le-Noble from the adjacent department of Essonne in 1969.
  The departmental capital, Versailles, which grew up around Louis XIV's château, was also the French capital for more than a century under the Ancien Régime and again between 1871 and 1879 during the early years of the Third Republic. Since then the château has continued to welcome the parlement when called upon to sit in a congressional sitting, jointly with the upper house in order to enact constitutional changes or, as happened most recently in June 2009, to listen to a formal declaration by the president.
  Yvelines is bordered by the departments of Val-d'Oise on the north, Hauts-de-Seine on the east, Essonne on the southeast, Eure-et-Loir on the southwest, and Eure on the west.
  
  wn.com/Yvelines

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  Adolf Hitler
  Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] ( listen); 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945. Hitler is commonly associated with the rise of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust.
  A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, precursor of the Nazi Party, in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup d'état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anticommunism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.
  
  wn.com/Adolf_Hitler
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  Amedeo Modigliani
  Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (Italian pronunciation: [ameˈdɛo modiʎˈʎani]; July 12, 1884 – January 24, 1920) was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form. He died in Paris of tubercular meningitis, exacerbated by poverty, overwork and addiction to alcohol and narcotics.
  Modigliani was born into a Jewish family in Livorno, Italy. A port city, Livorno had long served as a refuge for those persecuted for their religion, and was home to a large Jewish community. His maternal great-great-grandfather, Solomon Garsin, had immigrated to Livorno in the 18th century as a refugee.
  Modigliani's mother (Eugénie Garsin) who was born and grew up in Marseille, was descended from an intellectual, scholarly family of Sephardic Jews, generations of whom had resided along the Mediterranean coastline. Her ancestors were learned people, fluent in many languages, known authorities on sacred Jewish texts and founders of a school of Talmudic studies. Family legend traced the Garsin's lineage to the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The family business was believed to be a credit agency with branches in Livorno, Marseille, Tunis, and London. Their financial fortunes ebbed and flowed. At times they enjoyed affluence, at other times they were subject to dire financial crises and reduced circumstances.
  
  wn.com/Amedeo_Modigliani
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  André Breton
  André Breton (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃dʁe bʁətɔ̃]; 19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".
  Born to a family of modest means in Tinchebray (Orne) in Normandy, he studied medicine and psychiatry. During World War I he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the devotee of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide at age 24, and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume entitled Lettres de guerre (1919), for which Breton wrote four introductory essays.
  Breton married his first wife, Simone Kahn, on 15 September 1921. The couple relocated to rue Fontaine # 42 in Paris on 1 January 1922. The apartment on rue Fontaine became home to Breton's collection of more than 5,300 items: modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books, art catalogs, journals, manuscripts, and works of popular and Oceanic art.
  
  wn.com/André_Breton
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  André Gide
  André Paul Guillaume Gide (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃dʁe pɔl ɡijom ʒid]; 22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.
  Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straight-laced education and a narrow social moralism. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as suggested by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR.
  
  wn.com/André_Gide
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  Anna Magnani
  Anna Magnani (Italian pronunciation: [ˈanna maɲˈɲani]; 7 March 1908 – 26 September 1973) was an Italian stage and film actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress, along with four other international awards, for her portrayal of a Sicilian widow in The Rose Tattoo.
  Born in Rome, she worked her way through Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. During her career, her only child was stricken by polio when he was 18 months old and remained crippled.
  She was referred to as "La Lupa," the "perennial toast of Rome" and a "living she-wolf symbol" of the cinema. Time magazine described her personality as "fiery", and drama critic Harold Clurman said her acting was "volcanic". In the realm of Italian cinema, she was "passionate, fearless, and exciting," an actress that film historian Barry Monush calls "the volcanic earth mother of all Italian cinema." Director Roberto Rossellini called her "the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse". Playwright Tennessee Williams became an admirer of her acting and wrote The Rose Tattoo specifically for her to star in, a role for which she received her first Oscar in 1955.
  
  wn.com/Anna_Magnani
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  Antoine Furetière
  Antoine Furetière (28 December 1619 – 14 May 1688), French scholar and writer, was born in Paris.
  He studied law and practised for a time as an advocate, but eventually took orders and after various promotions became abbé of Chalivoy in the diocese of Bourges in 1662. In his leisure moments he devoted himself to letters, and in virtue of his satires—Nouvelle Allégorique, ou histoire des derniers troubles arrivés au royaume d'éloquence (1658) and Voyage de Mercure (1653)—he was admitted as a member of the Académie française in 1662. The academy had long promised a complete dictionary of the French language; and when the members heard that Furetière was on the point of issuing a work of a similar nature, they interfered, alleging that he had purloined from their stores and that they possessed the exclusive privilege of publishing such a book.
  After much recrimination on both sides, Furetière was expelled in 1685; but he took revenge in his satire, Couches de l'académie (Amsterdam, 1687). His Dictionnaire universel was posthumously published in 1690 (Rotterdam, 2 vols.). It was revised and improved by the Protestant jurist Henri Basnage de Beauval (1656–1710), who published his edition (3 vols.) in 1701, and it was superseded only by the compilation known as the Dictionnaire de Trévoux (Paris, 3 vols., 1704; 7th ed., 5 vols., 1771), a lexicon with which some Jesuits were occasionally affiliated and that drew heavily from the Dictionnaire universel.
  
  wn.com/Antoine_Furetière
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  Arno Breker
  Arno Breker (July 19, 1900 – February 13, 1991) was a German sculptor, best known for his public works in Nazi Germany, which were endorsed by the authorities as the antithesis of degenerate art.
  He was born in Elberfeld, now a part of Wuppertal and died in Düsseldorf.
  Breker was born in Elberfeld, in the west of Germany, the son of stonemason Arnold Breker. He began to study architecture, along with stone-carving and anatomy. At age 20 he entered the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts where he concentrated on sculpture, studying under Hubert Netzer and Wilhelm Kreis. He first visited Paris in 1924, shortly before finishing his studies. There he met with Jean Cocteau, Jean Renoir, Pablo Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and Alfred Flechtheim. In 1927 he moved to Paris, which he thereafter considered to be his home. He was quickly accepted by the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim. He also established close relationships with important figures in the art world, including Charles Despiau, Isamu Noguchi, Maurice de Vlaminck and André Dunoyer de Segonzac, all of whom he later portrayed. He travelled to North Africa, producing lithographs which he published under the title "Tunisian Journey". He also visited Aristide Maillol, who was later to describe Breker as "Germany's Michelangelo".
  
  wn.com/Arno_Breker
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  Arthur Honegger
  Arthur Honegger (pronounced [aʁtyʁ ɔnɛɡɛːʁ]; 10 March 1892 – 27 November 1955) was a Swiss composer, who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. He was a member of Les Six. His most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work Pacific 231, which is interpreted as imitating the sound of a steam locomotive.
  Born Oscar-Arthur Honegger (the first name was never used) in Le Havre, France, he initially studied harmony and violin in Paris, and after a brief period in Zurich, returned there to study with Charles-Marie Widor and Vincent d'Indy. He continued to study through the 1910s, before writing the ballet Le dit des jeux du monde in 1918, generally considered to be his first characteristic work. In 1926 he married Andrée Vaurabourg, a pianist and fellow student at the Paris Conservatoire, on the condition that they live in separate apartments. They lived apart for the duration of their marriage, with the exceptions of an attempt at living together in 1935, which lasted less than a year, and the last year of Honegger's life, when he could no longer live alone. They had one daughter, Pascale, born in 1932. Honegger also had a son, Jean-Claude (1926–2003), with the singer Claire Croiza.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Honegger
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  Berthe Bovy
  Berthe Bovy (6 January 1887 – 26 February 1977), sometimes known as Betty Bovy, was a Belgian actress who appeared in theatre, films and television programmes for over 60 years.
  Daughter of poet and journalist Théophile Bovy, she was born in Cheratte, now part of the commune of Visé, in the province of Liège. Seemingly interested in acting from an early age, an interest which her father encouraged, she enrolled in the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Brussels following a meeting with Sarah Bernhardt. From 1904 to 1906 she studied at the CNSAD in Paris. She joined the Comédie-Française in 1907.
  She was married and divorced three times, first to Charles Gribouval, secretary of the Comédie-Française, secondly with artist Ion Anton Ion-Don, and thirdly, in 1929, with Pierre Jules Louis Laudenbach, better known by his stage name Pierre Fresnay. She died at Montgeron in France and is buried in Liège.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Berthe_Bovy
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  Coco Chanel
  Gabrielle "Coco" Bonheur Chanel (19 August 1883 – 10 January 1971) was an influential French fashion designer, founder of the famous brand Chanel, whose modernist thought, practical design, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important and influential figure in 20th-century fashion. She was the only fashion designer to be named on Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century.
  Gabrielle Chanel was born to an unwed mother, Jeanne Devolle, a laundrywoman, in "the charity hospital run by the Sisters of Providence" in Saumur, France. She was Devolle's second daughter. The father, Albert Chanel was an itinerant street peddler who lived a nomadic life, traveling to and from market towns, the family residing in rundown lodgings. He married Jeanne Devolle several years after Chanel was born, in 1884, after Jeanne's family "united, effectively, to pay Albert to marry her". At birth Chanel’s name was entered into the official registry as “Chasnel.” Jeanne was too unwell to attend the registration and Albert was registered as "travelling". With both parents absent, Gabrielle's last name was misspelt, probably due to a clerical error. The couple eventually had five other children: Julia-Berthe, (1882–1912), Antoinette (born 1887) and three brothers, Alphonse (born 1885 died 2001), Lucien (born 1889) and Augustin (born and died 1814).
  
  wn.com/Coco_Chanel
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  Colette
  Colette (pronounced: [kɔ.lɛt]) was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954). She is best known for her novel Gigi, upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.
  Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph Colette and his wife Adèle Eugénie Sidonie "Sido" Colette (nėe Landoy) in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, in the Burgundy Region of France. She studied piano as a child and received her primary school diploma with high marks in mathematics and dictation. In 1893, at age 20, she married Henry Gauthier-Villars, a famous wit known as "Willy", who was 15 years her senior. He was a writer, music critic, and described as a "literary charlatan and degenerate".
  Her first books, the Claudine series, were published under her husband's pen name "Willy". Claudine still has the power to charm; in belle epoque France it was downright shocking, much to Willy's satisfaction and profit.
  
  wn.com/Colette
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  Darius Milhaud
  Darius Milhaud (French pronunciation: [daʁjys mijo]; 4 September 1892 – 22 June 1974) was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality. Darius Milhaud is to be counted among the modernist composers.
  Born in Marseilles to a Jewish family from Aix-en-Provence, Milhaud studied in Paris at the Paris Conservatory where he met his fellow group members Arthur Honegger and Germaine Tailleferre. He studied composition under Charles Widor and harmony and counterpoint with André Gedalge. He also studied privately with Vincent d'Indy. As a young man he worked for a while in the diplomatic entourage of Paul Claudel, the eminent poet and dramatist, who was serving as French ambassador to Brazil.
  On a trip to the United States in 1922, Darius Milhaud heard "authentic" jazz for the first time, on the streets of Harlem, which left a great impact on his musical outlook. The following year, he completed his composition "La création du monde" ("The Creation of the World"), using ideas and idioms from jazz, cast as a ballet in six continuous dance scenes.
  
  wn.com/Darius_Milhaud
• Dudley Fitts
  Dudley Fitts (April 28, 1903–July 10, 1968) was an American teacher, critic, poet, and translator. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and attended Harvard University where he edited the Harvard Advocate. He taught at The Choate School 1926-1941 and at Phillips Academy at Andover 1941-1968. He and his former student at Choate, Robert Fitzgerald, published translations of Alcestis of Euripides (1936), Antigone of Sophocles (1939), Oedipus Rex (1949), and The Oedipus Cycle (1949). Their translations were praised for their clarity and poetic quality.
  He died in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Dudley_Fitts
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  Edith Wharton
  Edith Wharton (/ ˈiːdɪθ ˈwɔːrtən/; born Edith Newbold Jones, January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937), was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer.
  Wharton was born to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander in New York City. She had two brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. The saying "Keeping up with the Joneses" is said to refer to her father's family. She was also related to the Rensselaer family, the most prestigious of the old patroon families. She had a lifelong friendship with her Rhinelander niece, landscape architect Beatrix Farrand of Reef Point in Bar Harbor, Maine, and often traveled with Henry James in Europe. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt.
  In 1885, at 23 years of age, she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years older. From a well-established Boston family, he was a sportsman and gentleman of the same social class and shared her love of travel, although they had little in common intellectually.^{[citation needed]} From the late 1880s until 1902, he suffered acute depression, and the couple ceased their extensive travel. At that time his depression manifested as a more serious disorder, after which they lived almost exclusively at The Mount, their estate designed by Edith Wharton. In 1908 her husband's mental state was determined to be incurable. She divorced him in 1913. Around the same time, Edith was overcome with the harsh criticisms leveled by the naturalist writers. Later in 1908 she began an affair with Morton Fullerton, a journalist for The Times, in whom she found an intellectual partner.
  
  wn.com/Edith_Wharton
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  Edmond Rostand
  Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand (1 April 1868 – 2 December 1918) was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism, and is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays provided an alternative to the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century. Another of Rostand's works, Les Romanesques, was adapted to the musical comedy, The Fantasticks.
  Rostand was born in Marseille, France, into a wealthy and cultured Provençal family. His father was an economist and a poet, a member of the Marseille Academy and the Institut de France. Rostand studied literature, history, and philosophy at the Collège Stanislas in Paris, France.
  His first play, a burlesque, Les romanesques was produced on 21 May 1894 at the Théâtre Français; it would be adapted in 1960 by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt into the long-running American musical The Fantasticks. Another early play, La Princesse Lointaine, was based on the story of the troubadour Rudel and the Lady of Tripoli. This play opened on 5 April 1895 at the Théâtre de la Renaissance. The part of Melissande was created by Sarah Bernhardt, who also was the original Photine of La Samaritaine (Theatre de la Renaissance, 14 April 1897), a Biblical drama in three scenes taken from the gospel story of the woman of Samaria.
  
  wn.com/Edmond_Rostand
• Edwige Feuillère
  Edwige Feuillère (29 October 1907, Vesoul, Haute-Saône – 13 November 1998, Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine) was a distinguished French stage and film actress.
  She was born Edwige Louise Caroline Cunati but sometimes used the stage name of Cora Lynn.
  In 1931 she married actor Pierre Feuillère, from whom she separated two years later (1933), but kept his surname. They had no children.
  She acted from 1931 until 1995, and was famed and admired in France.
  She died of natural causes, aged 91.
  
  wn.com/Edwige_Feuillère
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  Erik Satie
  Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (pronounced: [eʁik sati]) (17 May 1866 – Paris, 1 July 1925; signed his name Erik Satie after 1884) was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd.
  An eccentric, Satie was introduced as a "gymnopedist" in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds") preferring this designation to that of a "musician", after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911.
  In addition to his body of music, Satie also left a remarkable set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications, from the dadaist 391 to the American culture chronicle Vanity Fair. Although in later life he prided himself on always publishing his work under his own name, in the late nineteenth century he appears to have used pseudonyms such as Virginie Lebeau and François de Paule in some of his published writings.
  
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  Federico de Madrazo
  Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz (12 February 1815 – 11 June 1894) was a Spanish painter.
  Born in Rome, he was the son of the painter Madrazo y Agudo (1781-1859), and received his first instruction from his father. While still attending the classes at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, he painted his first picture, The Resurrection of Christ (1829), which was purchased by Queen Christina. Not long afterwards he painted Achilles in his Tent, and subsequently presented to the Academy The Continence of Scipio, which secured him admission as a member "for merit".
  While decorating the palace of Vista Alegre he took up portraiture. In 1852 he went to Paris, where he studied under Franz Winterhalter, and painted portraits of Baron Taylor and Ingres. In 1837 he was commissioned to produce a picture for the gallery at Versailles, and painted "Godfrey de Bouillon proclaimed King of Jerusalem". The artist then went to Rome, where he worked at various subjects, sacred and profane. Then he painted Maria Christina in the Dress of a Nun by the Bedside of Ferdinand III (1843), Queen Isabella, The Duchess of Medina-Coeli, and The Countess de Vilches (1845-1847), besides a number of portraits of the Spanish aristocracy, some of which were sent to the exhibition of 1855.
  
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  Francis Poulenc
  Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃sis ʒɑ̃ maʁsɛl pulɛ̃k]) (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) was a French composer and a member of the French group Les Six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music. Critic Claude Rostand, in a July 1950 Paris-Presse article, coined the term "half monk, half thug" (translated by Ivry from "le moine et le voyou"), a phrase that would often be used to describe Poulenc.
  Poulenc was born in Paris in 1899. His father Emile Poulenc was a second generation director of the Poulenc, and later Rhône-Poulenc, chemical corporation. His mother, an amateur pianist, taught him to play. He was introduced to Ricardo Viñes in 1914, a champion of the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and became his pupil shortly afterwards. He was a capable pianist, and the keyboard dominated his early compositions.
  In 1916 a childhood friend, Raymonde Linossier (1897-1930), introduced Poulenc to Adrienne Monnier's bookshop, the Maison des Amis des Livres. There he met avant-garde poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon. He was to set many of their poems to music.
  
  wn.com/Francis_Poulenc
• Francis Steegmuller
  Francis Steegmuller (July 3, 1906 – October 20, 1994) was an American biographer, translator and fiction writer, who was known chiefly as a Flaubert scholar.
  Born in New Haven, Connecticut, he contributed numerous short stories and articles to The New Yorker and also wrote under the pseudonyms of Byron Steel and David Keith. He won two National Book Awards, one for Arts and Letters for his 1970 biography of Jean Cocteau (Cocteau: A Biography), another for Translation for the 1980 first volume of Flaubert's complete letters (The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857), and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal. His first wife was Beatrice Stein, a painter who was a pupil and friend of Jacques Villon; she died in 1961. He married the writer Shirley Hazzard in 1963. His collected papers are held at two universities: at Yale University, the James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888) Papers and the Francis Steegmuller Collection for Jacques Villon; at Columbia University, the Francis Steegmuller Papers 1877–1979.
  
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  Georges Auric
  Georges Auric (15 February 1899 – 23 July 1983) was a French composer, born in Lodève, Hérault. He was a child prodigy and at age 15 he had his first compositions published. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Georges Caussade, and under the composer Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum. Before he turned 20 he had orchestrated and written incidental music for several ballets and stage productions.
  As a young student of at the Paris Conservatory in 1920, and, considered avant-garde, Auric became part of Satie and Cocteau's famous group Les Six, and was friends with the artist Jean Hugo. His participation led to writing settings of poetry and other texts as songs and musicals. In 1921, Cocteau asked him to write the music for his ballet, Les mariés de la tour Eiffel. He found himself short of time, so he asked his fellow composers of Les Six to contribute some music. All except Louis Durey agreed. During this time, he wrote his one act opera Sous le masque (1927). (An earlier opera, La reine de coeur (1919), is lost.) It was also in 1927 that he contributed the Rondeau for the children's ballet L'éventail de Jeanne, a collaboration between ten French composers. In 1952 he participated in yet another collaboration, the set of orchestral variations La guirlande de Campra.
  
  wn.com/Georges_Auric
• Georges Franju
  Georges Franju (12 April 1912 – 5 November 1987) was a French filmmaker. He was born in Fougères, Ille-et-Vilaine.
  Before working in French cinema, Franju had several different jobs. These included working for an insurance company and in a noodle factory. Franju was also briefly in the military in Algeria and was discharged in 1932. On his return, Franju studied to become a set designer and later created backdrops for music halls including Casino de Paris and the Folles Bergère.
  In the mid-thirties, Franju and Henri Langlois met through Franju's twin brother Jacques Franju. As well as creating the 16 mm short film Le Métro, Langois and Franju also started a short-lived film magazine and created a film club called Le Cercle du Cinema with 500 francs he borrowed from Langlois' parents. The club showed silent films from their own collections followed by an informal debate about them amongst members. From Le Cercle du Cinema, Franju and Langlois founded the Cinématheque Française in 1936. Franju ceased to be closely related with the Cinématheque Française as early as 1938, and only became associated it strongly again in the 1980s when he was appointed as the honorary artistic director of the Cinématheque. In 1937, Franju and Langlois co-founded another less successful film journal titled Cinematographe which had only two issues. In early 1940, Franju and Dominique Johansen co-founded another organization to promote cinema called Circuit Cinématographique des Arts et des Sciences which closed on 31 May 1940.
  
  wn.com/Georges_Franju
• Georges Hugnet
  Georges Hugnet (11 July 1906 – 26 June 1974), was a French graphic artist.
  He was also active as a poet, writer, art historian, graphic artist, bookbinding designer, critic and film director.
  Hugnet was a figure in the Dada movement and Surrealism.
  There is an inventory of his papers in the Carlton Lake Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
  
  
  
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• Germaine Tailleferre
  Germaine Tailleferre (19 April 1892 – 7 November 1983) was a French composer and the only female member of the group of composers known as Les Six.
  She was born Marcelle Taillefesse at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne, France, but as a young woman she changed her last name to "Tailleferre" to spite her father, who had refused to support her musical studies. She studied piano with her mother at home, composing short works of her own, after which she began studying at the Paris Conservatory where she met Louis Durey, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger. At the Paris Conservatory her skills were awarded with prizes in several categories. Most notably Tailleferre wrote 18 short works in the Petit livre de harpe de Madame Tardieu for Caroline Tardieu, the Conservatory’s Assistant Professor of Harp.
  With her new friends, she soon was associating with the artistic crowd in the Paris districts of Montmartre and Montparnasse including the sculptor Emmanuel Centore who would eventually marry her sister Jeanne. It was in the Montparnasse atelier of one of her painter friends where the initial idea for Les Six began. The publication of Jean Cocteau's manifest Le coq et l'Arlequin resulted in Henri Collet's media articles that led to instant fame for the group, of which Tailleferre was the only female member.
  
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  Gian Carlo Menotti
  Gian Carlo Menotti (pronounced [dʒan ˈkarlo meˈnɔtːi]) (July 7, 1911 – February 1, 2007) was an Italian-American composer and librettist. Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian citizenship. He wrote the classic Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, among about two dozen other operas intended to appeal to popular taste. He won the Pulitzer Prize for two of them: The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1955). He founded the noted Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds) in 1958 and its American counterpart, Spoleto Festival USA, in 1977. In 1986 he commenced a Melbourne Spoleto Festival in Australia, but he withdrew after three years.
  Born in Cadegliano-Viconago, Italy, near Lake Maggiore and the Swiss border, Menotti was the sixth of eight children of Alfonso and Ines Menotti, his father being a coffee merchant. Menotti began writing songs when he was seven years old, and at eleven wrote both the libretto and music for his first opera, The Death of Pierrot. He began his formal musical training at the Milan Conservatory in 1923.
  
  wn.com/Gian_Carlo_Menotti
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  Henri Bernstein
  Henri-Léon-Gustave-Charles Bernstein (20 June 1876, Paris – 27 November 1953, Paris) was a French playwright associated with Boulevard theatre.
  The far-right royalist Camelots du Roi youth organization of the Action française organized an anti-Semitic riot against a production of one of his plays in 1911. During the Second World War, he fled to the United States and lived in New York at the Waldorf Astoria. Jean-Pierre Aumont relates in his work Le Soleil et les Ombres (Robert Laffont, 1976) the luxury in which he lived, as well as his general disinterest in the war.
  He is buried in the Cimetière de Passy in Paris.
  
  
  
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  Henri de Bornier
  Henri, vicomte de Bornier (25 December 1825 – January 1901) was a French poet and dramatist, born in Lunel (Hérault).
  He came to Paris in 1845 with the object of studying law, but in that year he published a volume of verse, Les Premieres Feuilles, and the Comédie-Française accepted a play of his entitled Le Manage de Luther.
  He was given a post in the library of the Arsenal, where he served for half a century, becoming director in 1889. In 1875 was produced at the Théâtre Français his heroic drama in verse, La Fille de Roland. The action of the play turns on the love of Gerald, son of the traitor Ganelon, for the daughter of Roland. The patriotic subject and the nobility of the character of Gerald, who renounces Berthe when he learns his real origin, procured for the piece a great success. The conflict between honor and love and the grandiose sentiment of the play inevitably provoked comparison with Corneille. The piece would indeed be a masterpiece if, as its critics were not slow to point out, the verse had been quite equal to the subject.
  
  wn.com/Henri_de_Bornier
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  Henri Sauguet
  Henri Sauguet (18 May 1901 — 22 June 1989), was a French composer. Born in Bordeaux as Henri-Pierre Poupard, he adopted his mother's maiden name as his pseudonym. His output includes operas, ballets, four symphonies (1945, 1949, 1955, 1971), concertos, chamber and choral music and numerous songs, as well as film music. Although he experimented with musique concrète and expanded tonality, he remained opposed to particular systems and his music evolved little: he developed tonal or modal ideas in smooth curves, producing an art of clarity, simplicity and restraint.
  Sauguet started learning the piano at home when he was five years old. Later he was taught by the organist of the church of Sainte-Eulalie de Bordeaux. Because of the mobilization of his father in 1914, he was required to earn a living at a very young age. Eventually employed by the Prefecture of Montauban in 1919-1920, he formed a friendship with Joseph Canteloube, a former pupil of Vincent d'Indy. Together they collected and harmonized traditional songs under the title Chants d'Auvergne (Songs of Auvergne). During this period too he continued his musical education with local organists and himself served as organist at the small church of St-Vincent de Floirac just outside the city (1916–22). Sacred music, and especially organ arrangements, were to influence him for the rest of his life. One may instance the pieces he later wrote for organ and various combinations of instruments: Oraisons, with four saxophones (1976); Ne moriatur in aeternum, with trumpet (1979); Church Sonata, with string quintet (1985).
  
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  Igor Stravinsky
  Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (sometimes spelled Strawinsky or Stravinskii; Russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский, transliterated: Igorʹ Fëdorovič Stravinskij; Russian pronunciation: [ˌiɡərʲ ˌfʲjodɐrɐvʲɪtɕ strɐˈvʲinskʲɪj]; 17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian, and later French and American composer, pianist and conductor. He is acknowledged by many as one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.
  Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The Rite of Spring, which provoked a riot during its premiere, transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His so-called Russian phase was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassical music. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue and symphony). They frequently concealed a vein of intense emotion beneath a surface appearance of detachment or austerity and often paid tribute to the music of earlier masters, for example J.S. Bach and Tchaikovsky. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells and clarity of form, of instrumentation and of utterance.
  
  wn.com/Igor_Stravinsky
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  Ingrid Bergman
  Ingrid Bergman (29 August 1915 – 29 August 1982) was a Swedish actress who starred in a variety of European and American films. She won three Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, and the Tony Award for Best Actress. She is ranked as the fourth greatest female star of American cinema of all time by the American Film Institute. She is best remembered for her roles as Ilsa Lund in Casablanca (1942), a World War II drama co-starring Humphrey Bogart and as Alicia Huberman in Notorious (1946), an Alfred Hitchcock thriller co-starring Cary Grant.
  Before becoming a star in American films, she had already been a leading actress in Swedish films. Her first introduction to American audiences came with her starring role in the English remake of Intermezzo in 1939. In America, she brought to the screen a "Nordic freshness and vitality", along with exceptional beauty and intelligence, and according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, she quickly became "the ideal of American womanhood" and one of Hollywood's greatest leading actresses.
  
  wn.com/Ingrid_Bergman
• Jacques Charon
  Jacques Charon (27 February 1920-15 October 1975) was a French actor and film director.
  Born in Paris, Charon trained at the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique (CNSAD) and made his début at the Comédie-Française in 1941. During his time there which lasted until his death, he played over 150 roles in the classical and modern repertoire.
  Charon directed the 1968 feature film A Flea in Her Ear and the 1973 television movie Monsieur Pompadour.
  He played Spalanzani in the complete recording of The Tales of Hoffmann (Decca, 1971).
  Charon died in Paris and is buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre.
  
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  Jacques Rueff
  Jacques Rueff (23 August 1896 - 23 April 1978) was a French economist and adviser to the French Government.
  An influential French conservative and free market thinker, Rueff was born the son of a well known Parisian physician and studied economics and mathematics at the École Polytechnique. An important economic advisor to French President Charles de Gaulle, Rueff was also a major figure in the management of the French economy during the Great Depression. In 1941 Rueff was dismissed from his office as the deputy governor of the Bank of France as a result of the Vichy regime's new anti-Semitic laws. Rueff published several works of political economy and philosophy during his lifetime, including L'Ordre Social, which appeared shortly after Liberation.
  After the war Rueff became one of the leading French members of the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society, the president of the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency (IARA), and the minister of state of Monaco. Rueff was strongly in favour of European integration and served from 1952 to 1962 as a judge on the European High Court of Justice.
  
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  Jean Cocteau
  Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ kɔkto]; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Cocteau is best known for his novel Les Enfants terribles (1929), and the films Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946), and Orpheus (1949). His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María Félix, Édith Piaf and Raymond Radiguet.
  Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a village near Paris, to Georges Cocteau and his wife, Eugénie Lecomte; a socially prominent Parisian family. His father was a lawyer and amateur painter who committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. He left home at fifteen. 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. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City..."
  
  wn.com/Jean_Cocteau
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  Jean de La Chapelle
  Jean de La Chapelle (24 October 1651 - 29 May 1723) was a French writer and dramatist.
  Chapelle was born at Bourges, France. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1688. He died in Paris.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Jean_de_La_Chapelle
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  Jean Delannoy
  Jean Delannoy (12 January 1908 – 18 June 2008) was a French actor, film editor, screenwriter and film director.
  Although Delannoy was born in a Paris suburb, his family is from Haute-Normandie in the north of France. He was a Protestant, a descendant of Huguenots, some of whom fled the country during the French Wars of Religion first to settle in Wallonia then, after their name became De la Noye and then Delano, were on the second ship to emigrate to Plymouth, Massachusetts in America.
  Jean Delannoy was a student in Paris when he began acting in silent films. He eventually landed a job with Paramount Studios Parisian facilities, working his way up to head film editor. In 1934 he directed his first film and went on to a long career, both writing and directing. In 1946, his film about a Protestant minister titled La symphonie pastorale was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1960, his film, Maigret tend un piège was nominated for a BAFTA award for "Best Film from any Source."
  
  wn.com/Jean_Delannoy
• Jean Dutourd
  Jean Gwenaël Dutourd (14 January 1920 – 17 January 2011) was a French novelist. His mother died when he was seven years old. At the age of twenty, he was taken prisoner fifteen days after Germany's invasion of France in World War II. He escaped six weeks later and returned to Paris where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.
  His first work, Le Complexe de César appeared in 1946 and received the prix Stendhal. He was elected to the Académie française on 30 November 1978. In 1997 he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.
  Dutourd died on 17 January 2011, at the age of 91.
  L'Œil d'Apollon, by G. K. Chesterton; Les Muses parlent, by Truman Capote; and Le Vieil Homme et la Mer, by Ernest Hemingway.
  
  
  
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  Jean Genet
  Jean Genet (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ ʒəˈnɛ]) ((1910-12-19)December 19, 1910 – April 15, 1986(1986-04-15)) was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens.
  Genet's mother was a young prostitute who raised him for the first year of his life before putting him up for adoption. Thereafter Genet was raised in the provinces by a carpenter and his family who, according to Edmund White's biography, were loving and attentive. While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft (although White also suggests that Genet's later claims of a dismal, impoverished childhood were exaggerated to fit his outlaw image).
  
  wn.com/Jean_Genet
• Jean Hugo
  Jean Hugo (19 November 1894 – 21 June 1984) was a painter, illustrator, theatre designer and author. He was born in Paris and died in his home at the Mas de Fourques, near Lunel, France. Brought up in a lively artistic environment, he began teaching himself drawing and painting and wrote essays and poetry from a very early age. His artistic career spans the 20th century. From his early sketches of the First World War, through the creative ferment of the Parisian interwar years, and up to his death in 1984. He was part of a number of artistic circles that included Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet, Pablo Picasso, Georges Auric, Erik Satie, Blaise Cendrars, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Paul Eluard, Francis Poulenc, Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Colette, Marcel Proust, Jacques Maritain, Max Jacob and Carl Theodor Dreyer - Jean Hugo designed the sets and costumes for The Passion of Joan of Arc, Marie Bell, Louise de Vilmorin, Cecil Beaton and many others.
  Jean Cocteau: "Jean Hugo mixed his almost monstrous calm into the tumultuous enterprises of our youth. He was, and remains the very image of that perfect humility of the illuminators, for whom daily truths trumpted decorative graces. His powerful hand, his big jupiterian eye, his olypism in a way, did not use thunder but little watercolours so vast that it seemed as if their size was the result of a phenomenon of perspective. Indeed, he seems to view the sea in Brittany from a distance, and the garrigue by the big end of the telescope, which does not prevent him from evoking around us the mysterious odour of seaweed and wild herbs. Jean Hugo, subtle peasant, medieval monk, chasses the angel from the bizarre through knowing all its tricks by heart."
  
  wn.com/Jean_Hugo
• Jean Le Poulain
  Jean Le Poulain (1924–1988) was a French actor.
  
  
  
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  Jean Marais
  Jean-Alfred Villain-Marais (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ maʁɛ]; 11 December 1913 – 8 November 1998), was a French actor and director.
  A native of Cherbourg, France, Marais starred in several movies directed by Jean Cocteau, for a time his lover and a lifelong friend, most famously Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orphée (1949). Marais played over 100 roles in film and on television, and also was known for work in other areas of artistic expression, such as writing, painting and sculpture.
  In the 1950s, Marais became a star of swashbuckling pictures, enjoying great box office popularity in France. He performed his own stunts. In the 1960s, he played the famed villain of the Fantômas trilogy. After 1970, Marais's on-screen performances became few and far between, as he preferred concentrating on his stage work. He kept performing on stage until his eighties, also working as a sculptor. In 1985, he was the head of the jury at the 35th Berlin International Film Festival.
  He was featured in the 1995 documentary "Screening at the Majestic", which is included on the 2003 DVD release of the restored print of Beauty and the Beast. Marais appears on the cover sleeve of The Smiths single This Charming Man.
  
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  Jean Sylvain Bailly
  Jean-Sylvain Bailly (15 September 1736 – 12 November 1793) was a French astronomer and orator, one of the leaders of the early part of the French Revolution. He served as the mayor of Paris from 1789 to 1791 and was ultimately guillotined during the Reign of Terror.
  Born in Paris, Bailly was the son of Jacques Bailly, a supervisor of the Louvre. As a child he was originally intended for a career in the arts, but he became deeply attracted to science, particularly astronomy, by the influence of Nicolas de Lacaille. An excellent student with a "particularly retentive memory and inexhaustible patience", he calculated an orbit for the next appearance of Halley's Comet (in 1759), and correctly reduced Lacaille's observations of 515 stars. For such achievements he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1763.
  Bailly published his Essay on the theory of the satellites of Jupiter in 1766), an expansion of a presentation he had made to the Academy in 1763. It was followed up in 1771 by a noteworthy dissertation, On the inequalities of light of the satellites of Jupiter. and in 1778, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
  
  wn.com/Jean_Sylvain_Bailly
• Jean Wiener
  Jean Wiener (or Wiéner) (19 March 1896, Paris – 8 June 1982, Paris) was a French pianist and composer.
  Wiener was trained at the Conservatoire in Paris, where he studied alongside Darius Milhaud, and worked with Erik Satie. He then embarked on a career as concert impresario, composer and pianist. He was the house pianist at the Gaya bar, and later at Le Boeuf sur le Toit. In 1924 a chance encounter with Clement Doucet (who succeeded him at Le Boeuf) brought him into the world of popular music. Already a jazz enthusiast, Wiener found fame with Doucet in the music hall s of Europe as a piano duet, under the name "Wiener and Doucet" in which they performed classical music, hot dance and jazz. The two friends recorded many duets between 1925 and 1937. After the end of the war in 1945, Wiener devoted himself fully to composition, notably film music (working on more than 300), as well as the opening theme music for ORTF's film history program "History speechless" (History without words).
  He was of some significance in the promotion of new music, both by his friends in the Les Six (Milhaud, Poulenc, etc.), and by composers such as Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. His compositions involve the use of jazz informed by French wit and elegance.
  
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  Joseph Bédier
  Joseph Bédier (1 January 1864 – 29 August 1938) was a French writer and scholar and historian of medieval France.
  Bédier was born in Paris, France to Adolphe Bédier, a lawyer of Breton origin, and spent his childhood in Réunion. He was a professor of medieval French literature at the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland (1889–1891) and the Collège de France, Paris (c. 1893).
  Modern theories of the fabliaux and the chansons de geste are based on two of Bédier's studies.
  Bédier revived interest in several important old French texts, including Le roman de Tristan et Iseut (1900), La chanson de Roland (1921), and Les fabliaux (1893). He was a member of the Académie française from 1920 until his death.
  His Tristan et Iseut was translated into Cornish by A. S. D. Smith, into English by Hilaire Belloc and Paul Rosenfeld, and into German by Rudolf G. Binding.
  Bédier was also joint editor of the two-volume Littérature française, one of the most valuable modern general histories of French literature. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1929.
  
  wn.com/Joseph_Bédier
• Josette Day
  Josette Day (July 31, 1914 - June 27, 1978) was a French film actress.
  Born in Paris, she began her career as an actress in 1919 at the age of five. Day was married in 1941 to famous French studio head Marcel Pagnol, whom she met in January 1939.
  In 1946, she played her best-known role, alongside Jean Marais, as Belle in director Jean Cocteau's famous take on the classic French fairytale Beauty and the Beast.
  Despite numerous parts in famous French films, Day ended her career as an actress in 1950 when only 36 years old. Divorced from Pagnol by then, she retired to marry a wealthy businessman.
  
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• 
  Julia Migenes
  Julia Migenes (born March 13, 1949) is an American mezzo-soprano working primarily in musical theatre repertoire. She was born on the Lower East Side of New York to a family of Greek and Irish-Puerto Rican descent. She is sometimes credited as Julia Migenes-Johnson.
  Julia Migenes played Tevye's second daughter Hodel, in the original Broadway production of the long-running musical Fiddler on the Roof.
  
  wn.com/Julia_Migenes
• Jérôme Tharaud
  Jérôme Tharaud (18 May 1874, Saint-Junien, Haute-Vienne - 23 January 1953, Paris) was a French writer. He was elected the fifteenth occupant of Académie française seat 31 in 1938.
  
  
  
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  Kenneth Anger
  Kenneth Anger (born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer; February 3, 1927) is an American underground experimental filmmaker, actor and author of two controversial Hollywood Babylon books. Working exclusively in short films, he has produced almost forty works since 1937, nine of which have been grouped together as the "Magick Lantern Cycle", and form the basis of Anger's reputation as one of the most influential independent filmmakers in cinema history. His films variously merge surrealism with homoeroticism and the occult, and have been described as containing "elements of erotica, documentary, psychodrama, and spectacle." Anger himself has been described as "one of America's first openly gay filmmakers, and certainly the first whose work addressed homosexuality in an undisguised, self-implicating manner", and his "role in rendering gay culture visible within American cinema, commercial or otherwise, is impossible to overestimate", with several being released prior to the legalisation of homosexuality in the United States. He has also focused upon occult themes in many of his films, being fascinated by the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley, and is a follower of Crowley's religion, Thelema.
  
  wn.com/Kenneth_Anger
• Les six
  Les Six is a name, inspired by Mily Balakirev's The Five, given in 1920 by critic Henri Collet in an article titled "Les cinq Russes, les six Français et M. Satie" (Comoedia, 16 January 1920) to a group of six composers working in Montparnasse. Their music is often seen as a reaction against the musical style of Richard Wagner and the impressionist music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
  Formally, the Groupe des Six members were:
  In 1917, when many theatres and concert halls were closed because of World War I, Blaise Cendrars and the painter Moise Kisling decided to put on concerts at 6 Rue Huyghens, the studio of the painter Émile Lejeune. For the first of these events, the walls of the studio were decorated with canvases by Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Modigliani and others. Music by Erik Satie, Honegger, Auric and Durey was played. It was this concert that gave Satie the idea of assembling a group of composers^[which?] around himself to be known as Les nouveaux jeunes, forerunners of Les Six.
  
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  Liv Ullmann
  Liv Johanne Ullmann (born 16 December 1938) is a Norwegian actress and film director, as well as one of the "muses" of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Nominated five times for a Best Actress Golden Globe, winning once for The Emigrants, Ullmann has also been nominated for the Palme d'Or, two times for the Academy Award, and two times for a BAFTA Film Award.
  Ullmann was born in Tokyo, Japan, the daughter of Janna (née Lund) and Viggo Ullmann, an aircraft engineer who was working in Tokyo at the time. At age two, the family moved to Toronto, Canada where her father worked at the Norwegian air force base on Toronto Island during World War II. Four years later, her father died of a brain tumor, an event that affected her deeply. After the war, the rest of the family moved to Trondheim, Norway, where Ullman spent the rest of her youth. She currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.
  Ullmann began her acting career on the Norwegian stage in the mid 1950s. She continued to act in the theatre for most of her career, and became noted for her portrayal of Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, but became wider known once she started to work with eminent Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. She went on to act to significant acclaim in 10 of his most admired films, including Persona in 1966, The Passion of Anna in 1969, Cries and Whispers in 1972 and Autumn Sonata, in which her co-star, Ingrid Bergman, made her return to Swedish cinema. She co-starred often with Swedish actor and fellow Bergman collaborator, Erland Josephson, with whom she made the 1973 Swedish television drama, Scenes from a Marriage, which was also edited to feature-film length and distributed theatrically. Ullmann appeared with Laurence Olivier in Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far in 1977.
  
  wn.com/Liv_Ullmann
• Louis Durey
  Louis Durey (27 May 1888 – 3 July 1979) was a French composer.
  Louis Durey was born in Paris, the son of a local businessman. It was not until he was nineteen years old that he chose to pursue a musical career after hearing a performance of a Claude Debussy work. As a composer he was primarily self-taught. From the beginning, choral music was of great importance in Durey’s productivity. The first work to gain recognition in the music world was for a piano duet titled Carillons. At a 1918 concert this work attracted the interest of Maurice Ravel, who recommended him to his publisher.
  Durey communicated with his colleague, Darius Milhaud, and asked him to contribute a piano piece that would bring together the six composers who, in 1920 were dubbed Les Six. Despite the acclaim they received, Durey did not participate in the group's 1921 collaborative work Les mariés de la tour Eiffel, a decision which was a source of great irritation to Jean Cocteau.
  After the Les Six period, Durey continued with his career. Never feeling the need to belong to the musical establishment, he voiced his growing left-wing ideals that put him in an artistic isolation that lasted for the rest of his life.
  
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  Lucien Clergue
  Lucien Clergue (born August 14, 1934) is a French photographer.
  Lucien Clergue was born in Arles. From the age of 7, he learned to play the violin. Several years later, his teacher revealed to him that he had nothing more to teach him. From a family of shopkeepers, he could not pursue further studies in a conservatory. In 1949, he learned the rudiments of photography. Four years later, at a corrida in Arles, he showed his photographs to Pablo Picasso who, though subdued, demanded to see others. Within a year and a half, young Clergue worked with the goal of sending photos to Picasso. During this period, he worked on a series of photographs of traveling entertainers, acrobats and harlequins, the « Saltimbanques ». He also worked on a series whose subject was carrion.
  On 4 November 1955, Lucien Clergue visited Picasso in Cannes. Their friendship lasted near 30 years until the death of the Master. The book, Picasso my friend retraces the important moments of their relation.
  Clergue has taken many photographs of the gypsies of southern France, and he was instrumental in propelling the guitarist Manitas de Plata to fame. In 1968 he founded, along with his friend Michel Tournier the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival which is held in Arles in July. His works was presented during the festival from 1971–1973, 1975, 1979, 1982–1986, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994, 2000, 2003, 2007.
  
  wn.com/Lucien_Clergue
• Lucien Lelong
  Lucien Lelong (pronounced: [ly.sjɛ̃ lə.lɔ̃]; 11 October 1889 – 11 May 1958) was a French couturier who was prominent from the 1920s to the 1940s.
  Born in Paris as the son of Arthur Lelong, the owner of a textile shop, he trained at the Hautes Etudes de Commerciales in Paris and opened his fashion house in the late 1910s. Poor health caused the end of his career; Lelong retired in 1952.
  Lelong did not actually create the garments that bore his label. "He did not design himself, but worked through his designers," wrote Christian Dior, who was a member of the Lelong team from 1941 until 1946, during which time he created the collections in collaboration with Pierre Balmain. "Nevertheless," Dior continued, "in the course of his career as couturier his collections retained a style which was really his own and greatly resembled him." Other designers who worked for Lelong included Nadine Robinson and Hubert de Givenchy.
  Among Lelong's clients were Marie Duhamel, Jeanne Ternisien (wife of the banker Georges Nelze), the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld, Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Colette, and Rose Kennedy.
  
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  Luis Saslavsky
  Luis Saslavsky (April 21, 1903 in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina – March 20, 1995 in Buenos Aires, age 91) was an Argentine film director, screenwriter and film producer, and one of the influential directors in the Cinema of Argentina of the classic era. He directed and wrote over 40 films between 1931 and 1979.
  He directed films such as Crimen a las tres in 1935 and wrote for films such as Allá en el Norte in 1973. He retired from the industry in 1979.
  
  
  
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• 
  Léon Bakst
  Léon Samoilovitch Bakst (Russian: Лео́н Никола́евич Бакст) (May 10, 1866 – December 28, 1924) was a Russian painter and scene- and costume designer. He was a member of the Sergei Diaghilev circle and the Ballets Russes, for which he designed exotic, richly coloured sets and costumes
  Born as Lev (Leib) Samoilovich Rosenberg (Лев Самойлович Розенберг), he was also known as Leon (Lev) Nikolayevich Bakst (Леон (Лев) Николаевич Бакст).
  Leon was born in Grodno (currently Belarus) in a middle-class Jewish family. After graduating from gymnasium, he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts as a noncredit student, working part-time as a book illustrator.
  At the time of his first exhibition (1889) he took the surname of "Bakst," based on his mother's maiden name. The surname "Rosenberg" was thought to be too Jewish and not good for business. At the beginning of the 1890s he exhibited his works with the Society of Watercolourists. From 1893 to 1897 he lived in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian while still visiting Saint Petersburg often. After the mid-1890s he became a member of the circle of writers and artists formed by Sergei Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois, which later became the Mir Iskusstva art movement.
  
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  Léonide Massine
  Leonid Fyodorovich Myasin (Russian: Леонид Фёдорович Мясин), better known in the West by the French transliteration as Léonide Massine (9 August [O.S. 28 July] 1896 – 15 March 1979) was a Russian choreographer and ballet dancer.
  Léonide Massine was born in Moscow and was a ballet student at the Imperial Theater School in that city. From 1915 to 1921 he was the principal choreographer of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Following the departure of Vaslav Nijinsky, the company's first male star, Massine became the preeminent male star and took over Nijinsky's roles. After the death of Diaghilev in 1929 and the disbanding of his company, Massine became the choreographer and male lead dancer of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, one of the companies that succeeded the original Ballets Russes.
  Massine created the world's first symphonic ballet, Les Présages, in 1933 using Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5. This caused a furore amongst musical purists, who objected to a serious symphonic work being used as the basis of a ballet. Undeterred, Massine continued work on Choreartium, set to Brahms's Fourth Symphony, which had its premiere on 24 October 1933 at the Alhambra Theatre in London. He also choreographed a ballet to Hector Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie Fantastique and danced the role of the Young Musician with Tamara Toumanova as the Beloved at its premiere at Covent Garden, London, on 24 July 1936 with Colonel W. de Basil's Ballets Russes. Two years later he produced Seventh Symphony, to Beethoven's great score. It premiered on 5 May 1938 in Monte Carlo, with Alicia Markova, Nini Theilade, Frederic Franklin, and Igor Youskevitch as the principal dancers.
  
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  Malay Roy Choudhury
  Malay Roy Choudhury (born October 29, 1939) is a Bengali poet and novelist who founded the "Hungryalist Movement" in the 1960s. His literary works have been reviewed by sixty critics in HAOWA 49, a quarterly magazine which devoted its January 2001 special issue to Roy Choudhury's life and works. Commemorative issues have been published by Ahabkal and Aabar Eshechhi Phirey magazines on Malay Roychoudhury. Prof Swati Banerjee has based her MPhil thesis on his poems' anti-establishment features. Gale Research, based in Ohio, United States, published an autobiography of Roy Choudhury (in CAAS vol. 14), and both the Bangla Academy and the Northwestern University (Illinois), have archives of Roy Choudhury's "Hungry Literary Generation" publications. The Little Magazine Library and Research Centre, Kolkata has a complete section devoted to Malay Roychoudhury's works. Prof B.Dey of Assam University has been awarded Ph D for his 350 page seminal work on Malay Roy Choudhury and The Hungryalist Movement.
  
  wn.com/Malay_Roy_Choudhury
• 
  Marcel Proust
  Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.
  Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris' then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.
  Proust's father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia; he was the author of many articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a rich and cultured Jewish family from Alsace. She was literate and well-read; her letters demonstrate a well-developed sense of humour, and her command of English was sufficient for her to provide the necessary assistance to her son's later attempts to translate John Ruskin. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith. He was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practiced that faith.
  
  wn.com/Marcel_Proust
• Marianne Oswald
  Marianne Oswald (January  9, 1901—February 25, 1985) was the stage name of Sarah Alice Bloch, a French singer and actress born in Sarreguemines in Alsace-Lorraine. She took this stage name from a character she much admired, the unhappy Oswald in the Ibsen play Ghosts. She was noted for her hoarse voice, heavy half-Lorraine, half-German accent, and for singing about unrequited love, despair, sadness, and death. She sang the songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. She was friends with Jean Cocteau, Jacques Prévert, François Mauriac, and Albert Camus. In fact, the text for one of her album covers was written by Camus. She was an inspiration for the composers Francis Poulenc and Arthur Honegger
  Marianne Oswald's parents were Jewish immigrants, exiles from Poland. Both parents died young and she became an orphan in 1917 at the age of 16. Initially she was sent to a boarding school in Munich, but by 1920 she found her way to Berlin where she began singing in the thriving cabarets of the period. During this time, an operation to remove a goiter—she called it "having my throat cut"—left her with a permanent hoarse voice which would have a major, and not entirely negative, effect on her singing career.
  
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  Mark Twain
  Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel."
  Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He apprenticed with a printer. He also worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's newspaper. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join Orion. He was a failure at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. While a reporter, he wrote a humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", which became very popular and brought nationwide attention. His travelogues were also well-received. Twain had found his calling.
  He achieved great success as a writer and public speaker. His wit and satire earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.
  
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  Marlene Dietrich
  Marlene Dietrich (German pronunciation: [maɐˈleːnə ˈdiːtʁɪç]; 27 December 1901 – 6 May 1992) was a German-American actress and singer.
  Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films. Her performance as "Lola-Lola" in The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg, brought her international fame and provided her a contract with Paramount Pictures in the US. Hollywood films such as Shanghai Express and Desire capitalised on her glamour and exotic looks, cementing her stardom and making her one of the highest-paid actresses of the era. Dietrich became a US citizen in 1939, and throughout World War II she was a high-profile frontline entertainer. Although she still made occasional films in the post-war years, Dietrich spent most of the 1950s to the 1970s touring the world as a successful show performer.
  In 1999, the American Film Institute named Dietrich the ninth-greatest female star of all time.
  
  wn.com/Marlene_Dietrich
• María Félix
  María Félix (April 8, 1914 – April 8, 2002) was a Mexican actress and the most iconic leading lady of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, known for her larger-than-life, tough character in films. She was nominated for five Ariel Awards, of which she won three for Enamorada, Río Escondido, Doña Diabla and a special Golden Ariel Award for her contribution to cinema. She was more commonly known, particularly in her later years, by the honorific La Doña.
  She was born María de los Ángeles Félix Güereña in Álamos, Sonora, Mexico. There is some dispute regarding Miss Félix's date of birth. There is a large (but not unanimous) opinion that she was born on April 8, 1914, which means that she died on her 88th birthday. However, her obituary in The New York Times states that she was born on May 4, 1914, which would have made her 87 at the time of her death on April 8, 2002. Some claim her birth certificate supports the April 8, 1914 birthdate, although no actual evidence (such as a copy of either the birth or the death certificate) has been presented as concrete evidence.^{[citation needed]} Félix was the ninth of twelve children born to Bernardo Félix, descendant of Yaqui Indians and Josefina Güereña, who was of Spanish descent: Josefina, María de la Paz, Bernardo, Miguel, María Mercedes, Fernando, María del Sacramento, Pablo, Victoria Eugenia, Ricardo and Benjamin. Since her childhood, María showed a strong temperament. She preferred playing with boys than girls, which would carry the jealousy of her sisters..
  
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  Maurice Barrès
  Maurice Barrès (French pronunciation: [baʁɛs]; 19 August 1862 – 4 December 1923) was a French novelist, journalist, and politician and agitator known for his nationalist and antisemitic views.
  In his youth a Boulangist deputy, he progressively developed a theory close to Romantic nationalism and shifted to the traditionalist right during the Dreyfus Affair, leading the Anti-Dreyfusards alongside Charles Maurras. In 1906, he was elected both to the Académie française and as deputy of the Seine, and until his death he sat with the conservative Entente républicaine démocratique. A strong supporter of the Union sacrée (Holy Union) during World War I, Barrès remained a major influence of generations of French writers, as well as of monarchists, although he was not a monarchist himself.
  Born at Charmes, Vosges, he received his secondary education at the lycée of Nancy, and in 1883 continued his legal studies in Paris. Establishing himself at first in the Quartier Latin, he became acquainted with Leconte de Lisle's cenacle and with the symbolists in the 1880s, even meeting Victor Hugo once. He had already started contributing to the monthly periodical, Jeune France (Young France), and he now issued a periodical of his own, Les Taches d'encre, which survived for only a few months. After four years of journalism he settled in Italy, where he wrote Sous l'œil des barbares (1888), the first volume of a trilogie du moi (also called Le Culte du moi or The Cult of the Self), completed by Un Homme libre (1889), and Le Jardin de Bérénice (1891). The Cult of the Self trilogy was influenced by Romanticism, and also made an apology of the pleasure of the senses.
  
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• Maurice Delage
  Maurice Delage (13 November 1879 – 21 September 1961) was a French composer and pianist.
  Delage was born and died in Paris. A student of Ravel and member of Les Apaches, he was influenced by travels to India and the East. Ravel's "La vallée des cloches" from Miroirs was dedicated to Delage.
  Delage's best known piece is Quatre poèmes hindous (1912–1913). His Ragamalika (1912–1922), based on the classical music of India, is also significant in that it calls for prepared piano; the score specifies that a piece of cardboard be placed under the strings of the B-flat in the second line of the bass clef to dampen the sound, imitating the sound of an Indian drum.
  
  
  
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  Max Jacob
  Max Jacob (July 12, 1876 – March 5, 1944) was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.
  After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career. On the Boulevard Voltaire, he shared a room with Pablo Picasso who he became great friends with( and was included in his artwork 'Three Musicians'), who introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced him to Georges Braque. He would become close friends with Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916. He also befriended and encouraged the artist Romanin, otherwise known as French politician and future Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Moulin's famous nom de guerre Max is presumed to be selected in honor of Jacob.
  Jacob, who had Jewish origins, claimed to have had a vision of Christ in 1909, and converted to Catholicism.
  Max Jacob is regarded as an important link between the symbolists and the surrealists, as can be seen in his prose poems Le cornet à dés (The Dice Box, 1917 - the 1948 Gallimard edition was illustrated by Jean Hugo) and in his paintings, exhibitions of which were held in New York City in 1930 and 1938.
  
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  Michel Bouquet
  Michel Bouquet (born 6 November 1925) is a French film actor. He has appeared in over 90 films since 1947. He was born in Paris, France.
  
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  Pablo Picasso
  Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpaβlo piˈkaso], 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
  Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are commonly regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.
  
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• Pierre de Boissat
  Pierre de Boissat (1603 in Vienne, Isère – 28 March 1662) was a soldier, writer, poet and translator.
  Knight and Count Palatine, Boissat began his career in the military. He was one of the first members of the Académie française, and first to occupy the Academy's seat 31 in 1634. Boissat translated Les fables d'Esope Phrygien, illustrées de Discours moraux, philosophiques et politiques, published in 1633 by his friend Jean Baudouin, used by Jean de La Fontaine. He is also attributed with Une Morale chrétienne and Une Histoire négropontique. His home, l'hôtel Pierre de Boissat, on rue des Orfèvres in Vienna, Austria exists today as an historic monument.
  
  
  
  
  
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  Raymond Radiguet
  Raymond Radiguet (18 June 1903—12 December 1923) was a French author whose two novels were noted for their explicit themes and writing style and tone.
  Radiguet was born in Saint-Maur, Val-de-Marne close to Paris, the son of a caricaturist. In 1917 he moved to the city. Soon he would drop out of the Lycée Charlemagne, where he studied, in order to pursue his interests in journalism and literature. He associated himself with the Modernist set, befriending Picasso, Max Jacob, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris and especially Jean Cocteau, who became his mentor. Radiguet also had several well-documented relationships with women. An anecdote told by Ernest Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging Radiguet (known in the Parisian literary circles as "Monsieur Bébé" – Mister Baby) with decadence for his tryst with a model: "Bébé est vicieuse. Il aime les femmes." ("Baby is depraved. He likes women." [Note the use of the feminine adjective]). Radiguet, Hemingway implies, employed his sexuality to advance his career, being a writer "who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil."
  
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  René Clair
  René Clair (11 November 1898 – 15 March 1981) born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with fantasy. He went on to make some of the most innovative early sound films in France, before going abroad to work in the UK and USA for more than a decade. Returning to France after World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier years. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960.
  René Clair was born and grew up in Paris in the district of Les Halles, whose lively and picturesque character made a lasting impression on him. His father was a soap merchant; he had an elder brother, Henri Chomette (born 1896). He attended the Lycée Montaigne and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. In 1914 he was studying philosophy; his friends at that time included Raymond Payelle who became the actor and writer Philippe Hériat. In 1917, at the age of 18, he served as an ambulance driver in World War I, before being invalided out with a spinal injury. He was deeply affected by the horrors of war that he witnessed and gave expression to this in writing a volume of poetry called La Tête de l'homme (which remained unpublished). Back in Paris after the war, he started a career as a journalist at the left-wing newspaper L'Intransigeant.
  
  wn.com/René_Clair
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  Robert Bresson
  Robert Bresson (pronounced [ʁɔbɛʁ bʁɛˈsɔ̃] in French; 25 September 1901 – 18 December 1999) was a French film director known for his spiritual, ascetic style. He contributed notably to the art of film and influenced the French New Wave. He is often referred to as the most highly regarded French filmmaker after Jean Renoir. As Jean-Luc Godard said, "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music."
  Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth (née Clausels) and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life, and the year of his birth – 1901 or 1907 – varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and turned to painting after graduating. Three formative influences in his early life seem to have a mark on his films - Catholicism, art and his experiences as a prisoner of war.
  Initially also a photographer, Bresson made his first short film, Les affaires publiques (Public Affairs) in 1934. During World War II, he spent over a year in a prisoner-of-war camp - an experience which informs Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped). In a career that spanned fifty years, Bresson made only 13 feature-length films. This reflects his meticulous approach to the filmmaking process and his non-commercial preoccupations.^{[citation needed]} Difficulty finding funding for his projects was also a factor.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Bresson
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  Roland Petit
  Roland Petit (January 13, 1924 – July 10, 2011) was a French choreographer and dancer. He trained at the Paris Opéra Ballet school, and became well known for his creative ballets.
  Petit was born in Villemomble, France an area near Paris, France. Petit trained at the Paris Opéra Ballet school under Gustave Ricaux and Serge Lifar and began to dance with the corps de ballet in 1940. He founded the Ballets des Champs-Élysées in 1945 and the Ballets de Paris in 1948, at Théâtre Marigny, with Zizi Jeanmaire as star dancer.
  Petit collaborated with Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Saint-Laurent and César Baldaccini and participated in several French and American films. He returned to the Paris Opéra in 1965 to mount a production of Notre Dame de Paris (with music by Maurice Jarre). He continued to rule ballets for the largest theatres of France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, and Cuba.
  In 1968, his ballet Turangalîla provoked a small revolution within the Paris Opéra. Four years later, in 1972, he founded the Ballet National de Marseille with the piece “Pink Floyd Ballet”. He directed the Ballet for the next 26 years. For the décor of his ballets, he would work in close collaboration with the painter Jean Carzou (1907–2000), but also with other artists such as Max Ernst.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Roland_Petit
• Ronald Duncan
  Ronald Duncan (6 August 1914 – 3 June 1982) was a writer, poet and playwright, now best known for preparing the libretto for Benjamin Britten's opera The Rape of Lucretia, first performed in 1946.
  Duncan was born, with the surname Dunkelsbühler, in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), in 1914. He became a pacifist during the 1930s, and his first publication, in January 1937, was The Complete Pacifist, a pamphlet appearing from the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) and carrying endorsements by Canon Dick Sheppard and other prominent pacifists. Later that year he wrote the words for a Pacifist March composed by Benjamin Britten (also a pacifist) for the PPU, but the work was not a success and was soon withdrawn. In the same year also he visited Gandhi in India, and from 1938 was on friendly terms with the British Hispanist Gerald Brenan.
  In 1937, again, Duncan met Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to found the "little magazine" Townsman, 1938-1945. Of the 24 issues, numbers 21-24 (1944–45) appeared as The Scythe, a title that signalled Duncan's increasing interest in agriculture and husbandry. His pacifism had led him to set up a co-operative farming enterprise at Mead Farm, near Welcombe, Devon, during the Second World War. This failed by 1943, and in 1944 Duncan successfully faced a conscientious objection tribunal. In 1942-43 he helped Britten with the last scene of the opera Peter Grimes, and wrote the whole of the libretto for The Rape of Lucretia in 1945-46.
  
  wn.com/Ronald_Duncan
• Serge de Poligny
  Serge de Poligny (1903–1983) was a French screenwriter and film director.
  Director
  
  wn.com/Serge_de_Poligny
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  Sergei Diaghilev
  Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev (/diˈæɡɨlɛf/; Russian: Серге́й Па́влович Дя́гилев / Sergei Pavlovich Dyagilev pronounced [sʲɪˈrɡʲej ˈpavləvʲɪtɕ ˈdʲæɡʲɪlʲɪf]; 31 March [O.S. 19 March] 1872 – 19 August 1929), usually referred to outside of Russia as Serge, was a Russian art critic, patron, ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, from which many famous dancers and choreographers would arise.
  
  wn.com/Sergei_Diaghilev
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  Silvia Monfort
  Silvia Monfort (born Silvia Favre-Bertin; 6 June 1923, Paris–30 March 1991, Paris) was a French actress and theatre director. Daughter of the sculptor Charles Favre-Bertin and wife of Pierre Gruneberg.
  She was named Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1973, Officer of Arts and Letters in 1979 and then Commander of Arts and Letters in 1983. She is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery.
  She was born in the neighborhood of Le Marais, on Rue Elzévir, a short distance away from Rue de Thorigny, where she would set up her first theatre much later. Her family had lived in this Parisian neighborhood for seven generations. She lost her mother very early and her father put her in a boarding school. She undertook her secondary studies first at lycée Victor Hugo and then at lycée Victor Duruy. She obtained her baccalauréat at 14½ with special permission. Her father had intended for her career to be spent at the Gobelin manufactory but she preferred the theatre and took classes with Jean Hervé and Jean Valcourt. In 1939, aged 16, she met Maurice Clavel, who directed the Resistance network in Eure-et-Loir. Under the pseudonym "Sinclair" (the name of a hill that looms over Sète, Maurice Clavel's native town), she involved herself at his side and participated in the liberation of Nogent-le-Rotrou and of Chartres in 1944. She was one of the notables who welcomed General De Gaulle on the square in front of the Cathedral of Chartres. Once the war ended, she married Maurice Clavel. She was decorated with the Croix de guerre by General De Gaulle and with the Bronze Star by General Patton.
  
  wn.com/Silvia_Monfort
• Simone Signoret
  Simone Signoret (French pronunciation: [simɔn siɲɔˈʁɛ]; 25 March 1921 – 30 September 1985) was a French cinema actress often hailed as one of France's greatest movie stars. She became the first French person to win an Academy Award, for her role in Room at the Top (1959). In her lifetime she also received a BAFTA, an Emmy, Golden Globe, Cannes Film Festival recognition and the Silver Bear for Best Actress.
  Signoret was born Simone Henriette Charlotte Kaminker in Wiesbaden, Germany to André and Georgette (Signoret) Kaminker as the eldest of three children, with two younger brothers. Her father, a pioneering interpreter who worked in the League of Nations, was a French-born Jewish army officer of Polish descent, who brought the family to Neuilly-sur-Seine on the outskirts of Paris. Her mother Georgette, from whom she acquired her stage name, was a French Catholic. Signoret grew up in Paris in an intellectual atmosphere and studied the English language in school, earning a teaching certificate. She tutored English and Latin and worked part-time as a typist for a French collaborationist newspaper, Les nouveaux temps, run by Jean Luchaire.
  
  wn.com/Simone_Signoret
• 
  Tamara Karsavina
  Tamara Platonovna Karsavina (10 March 1885 – 26 May 1978) was a famous Russian ballerina, renowned for her beauty, who was most noted as a Principal Artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and later the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev. After settling in Hampstead, England, she began teaching ballet professionally and would become recognised as one of the founders of modern British ballet. She assisted in the establishment of The Royal Ballet and was a founder member of the Royal Academy of Dance, which is now the world's largest dance teaching organisation.
  Karsavina was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, the daughter of Platon Konstantinovich Karsavin. A principal dancer and mime with the Imperial Ballet, Platon was also employed as an instructor at the Imperial Ballet School (Vaganova Ballet Academy) and counted among his students Karsavina's future dancing partner and paramour, Michel Fokine.
  She was the sister of religious philosopher and medieval historian Lev Karsavin. Her niece, Marianna Karsavina, was married to Ukrainian author and artistic patron Pyotr Suvchinsky. Through her mother, Karsavina was distantly related to the religious poet and co-founder of the Slavophile movement, Aleksey Khomyakov.
  
  wn.com/Tamara_Karsavina
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  Vaslav Nijinsky
  Vaslav (or Vatslav) Nijinsky (Russian: Ва́цлав Фоми́ч Нижи́нский; Russian pronunciation: [ˌvatslɐf foˌmʲitʃ nʲɪˈʐinskʲɪj]; Polish: Wacław Niżyński; Ukrainian: Ва́цлав Томович Ніжи́нський; March 12, 1889/1890 – April 8, 1950) was a Russian danseur and choreographer of Polish descent, cited as the greatest male dancer of the early 20th century. He grew to be celebrated for his virtuosity and for the depth and intensity of his characterizations. He could perform en pointe, a rare skill among male dancers at the time and his ability to perform seemingly gravity-defying leaps was also legendary. The choreographer Bronislava Nijinska was his sister. He also had a brother, Stassik Nijinsky.
  Vaslav Nijinsky was born in 1889 or 1890 in Kiev, Ukraine, a part of Russian Empire as Wacław Niżyński, to ethnic Polish parents, dancers Tomasz Niżyński and Eleonora Bereda. Nijinsky was christened in Warsaw, and considered himself to be a Pole despite difficulties in properly speaking the language as a result of his childhood in Russia's interior where his parents worked.
  
  wn.com/Vaslav_Nijinsky
• Wikipedia Persondata
  wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
• 
  World War I
  World War I (WWI), which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939 (World War II), and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It involved all the world's great powers, which were assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (based on the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France and Russia) and the Central Powers (originally centred around the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy; but, as Austria–Hungary had taken the offensive against the agreement, Italy did not enter into the war). These alliances both reorganised (Italy fought for the Allies), and expanded as more nations entered the war. Ultimately more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9 million combatants were killed, largely because of enormous increases in lethality of weapons, thanks to new technology, without corresponding improvements in protection or mobility. It was the sixth-deadliest conflict in world history, subsequently paving the way for various political changes such as revolutions in the nations involved.
  
  wn.com/World_War_I
• 
  Xavier Marmier
  Xavier Marmier (22 June 1808 - 12 October 1892) was a French author born in Pontarlier, in Doubs. He had a passion for travelling, and this he combined throughout his life with the production of literature. After journeying in Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, he was attached in 1835 to the Arctic expedition of the Recherche; and after a couple of years at Rennes as professor of foreign literature, he visited (1842) Russia, (1845) Syria, (1846) Algeria, (1848–1849) North America and South America, and numerous volumes from his pen were the result. In 1870 he was elected to the Academy (Seat 31), and he was for many years prominently identified with the Sainte-Geneviève library. He did much to encourage the study of Scandinavian literature in France, publishing translations of Holberg, Oehlenschlager and others. He died in Paris in 1892.
   This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
  
  wn.com/Xavier_Marmier
• Yvonne de Bray
  Yvonne de Bray (12 May 1889 – 1 February 1954) was a French stage and film actress. She was born Yvonne Laurence Blanche de Bray in Paris and died there.
  1952 – We Are All Murderers
  1950 – Olivia
  1949 – Gigi
  1948 – L'Aigle à deux têtes
  1948 – Les Parents terribles
  1943 – L'Éternel Retour
  
  
  
  wn.com/Yvonne_de_Bray
• 
  Édith Piaf
  Édith Piaf (US /piːˈɑːf/ or UK /ˈpiːæf/; French: [eˈdit pjaf]; 19 December 1915 – 11 October 1963), born Édith Giovanna Gassion, was a French singer and cultural icon who became widely regarded as France's national popular singer, as well as being one of France's greatest international stars. Her singing reflected her life, with her specialty being ballads. Among her songs are "La Vie en rose" (1946), "Non, je ne regrette rien" (1960), "Hymne à l'amour" (1949), "Milord" (1959), "La Foule" (1957), "l'Accordéoniste" (1955), and "Padam... Padam..." (1951).
  Despite numerous biographies, much of Piaf's life is shrouded in mystery. She was born Édith Giovanna Gassion in Belleville, Paris. Legend has it that she was born on the pavement of Rue de Belleville 72, but her birth certificate cites the Hôpital Tenon, the hospital for the 20th arrondissement of which Belleville is part.
  She was named Édith after the World War I British nurse Edith Cavell, who was executed for helping French soldiers escape from German captivity. Piaf—an argot colloquialism for "sparrow"—was a nickname she would receive 20 years later.
  
  wn.com/Édith_Piaf

Jean Cocteau (1949)

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