Jean Cocteau

Born in Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris, on July 5, 1889, Jean Cocteau became one of the most recognizable artistic figures in 20th-century France. He worked across an unusual range of forms—poetry, novels, plays, criticism, visual art, and cinema—but he liked to think of all of it as poetry in different shapes.

Cocteau was closely connected with the Paris avant-garde and collaborated with major artists of his time. He helped shape modern theater and film through works such as Orphée, Les Enfants terribles, and the film La Belle et la Bête, blending classical myth with modern emotion and striking visual imagination.

He was elected to the Académie française in 1955 and remained a major cultural presence until his death on October 11, 1963, in Milly-la-Forêt. Readers often return to him for the same reason viewers do: his work feels elegant, strange, and vividly alive.