Portrait
Jean Cocteau
Born
5 July 1889Maisons-Laffitte, France
Died
11 October 1963Milly-la-Forêt, France · aged 74
Poet, artist and filmmakerFrance

Jean Cocteau

A poet, filmmaker and artist who carried a language of dreams across several forms of art.

Jean Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte in 1889. Raised in a prosperous family, he began writing and drawing as a child and entered Parisian literary life while still young. Poetry remained the thread connecting a career that moved through theatre, film and visual art.

For the Ballets Russes he worked with Erik Satie and Pablo Picasso on “Parade” (1917). His collaborations placed him close to the avant-garde without containing his work within a single movement. “Les Enfants Terribles” (1929) gave an especially concentrated form to his interest in closed worlds, obsession and dangerous imaginative games.

His attachments included the young writer Raymond Radiguet, whose death in 1923 brought profound grief, and the actor Jean Marais, whom he met in 1937. Marais became his partner, collaborator and lifelong friend, appearing in films including “Beauty and the Beast” and “Orpheus”. The anonymously published “Le Livre blanc” explored desire between men and is generally attributed to Cocteau.

Elected to the Académie française in 1955, Cocteau continued drawing, decorating buildings and making films. He died at his home in Milly-la-Forêt in 1963, aged 74.

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