Famous Playwrights from France
- Alain-René Lesage (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ ʁəne ləsaʒ]; 6 May 1668 – 17 November 1747; older spelling Le Sage) was a French novelist and playwright. Lesage is best known for his comic novel The Devil upon Two Sticks (1707, Le Diable boiteux), his comedy Turcaret (1709), and his picaresque novel Gil Blas (1715–1735).
- Birthplace: Sarzeau, France
- Alejandro Jodorowsky, a titan in the world of cinema and comic books, was born in 1929 in Tocopilla, Chile. His cultural influence extends beyond his native land, with a career spanning several continents and multiple mediums. Jodorowsky's early life was marked by a profound sense of mysticism inherited from his parents who were both Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. This spirituality would go on to shape much of his artistic output, imbuing it with a unique depth and complexity. Jodorowsky's foray into filmmaking began in Mexico, producing avant-garde theater during the 1960s. His ascent to international prominence came with the release of El Topo (1970), a metaphysical western often regarded as the first-ever midnight movie. Equally significant is his attempt to adapt Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune, a project that remains one of the most famous unmade films in history. Despite its non-completion, the planned film had a far-reaching impact on the sci-fi genre, influencing creators such as Ridley Scott and George Lucas. Apart from his cinematic ventures, Jodorowsky is celebrated for his work in comic books. He collaborated with French artist Moebius to create The Incal series which has since been acclaimed as a masterpiece of the comic medium. His other prominent works include Metabarons and Technopriests. Furthermore, Jodorowsky's exploration of spiritual themes led him to create "psychomagic", a therapeutic practice that combines elements of tarot, shamanism, and traditional psychotherapy. Alejandro Jodorowsky's multi-faceted career thus presents him as a visionary artist and innovative storyteller, consistently pushing boundaries across diverse spheres of creativity.
- Birthplace: Tocopilla, Chile
- Alexandre Bisson (9 April 1848 – 27 January 1912) was a French playwright, vaudeville creator, and novelist. Born in Briouze, Orne in Lower Normandy, he was successful in his native France as well as in the United States. Remembered as a significant creator of Parisian vaudeville, in collaboration with Edmond Gondinet, Bisson's 1881 three-act comedy Un Voyage d'agrément was performed at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris. Of his works, Bisson is best remembered for his play Madame X, which was performed in 1910 both in Paris and on Broadway with Sarah Bernhardt in the leading role. Over the years, the play would be revived for Broadway three times and nine Madame X motion pictures in several languages have been filmed. The first silent screen adaptation was in 1916 and the latest in 2000. Better-known versions include a 1929 sound film starring Ruth Chatterton and directed by Lionel Barrymore plus the 1966 film starring Lana Turner. In 2006, a musical based on the original play was produced in Chicago. Bisson also adapted the 1910 best-selling Florence Barclay novel, The Rosary as a three-act play for the Paris stage. Widely acclaimed in the United States, Alexandre Bisson was invited to write about the theatre by The Saturday Evening Post and his articles "The Dilemmas of the Theater" and "How the World Contributes to the American Stage" were published in 1912. Alexandre Bisson died in Paris in 1912 at the age of 63.
- Birthplace: Briouze, France
- Alexandre Dumas was a writer who was known for writing "The Three Musketeers - Milady," "Revenge," and "Queen Margot."
- Birthplace: Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne, France
- Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny (27 March 1797 – 17 September 1863) was a French poet and early leader of French Romanticism. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare.
- Birthplace: Loches, France
- Alphonse Daudet (French: [dodɛ]; 13 May 1840 – 16 December 1897) was a French novelist. He was the husband of Julia Daudet (Mastani) and father of Edmée Daudet, and writers Léon Daudet and Lucien Daudet.
- Birthplace: Nîmes, France
Antoine Danchet
Dec. at 76 (1671-1748)Antoine Danchet (7 September 1671 – 21 February 1748) was a French playwright, librettist and dramatic poet.- Birthplace: Riom, France
Antoine Jacob
Dec. at 45 (1640-1685)Antoine Jacob (1639, in Paris – 1685, in Aix), known as Montfleury, was a French actor and playwright and a rival of Molière.- Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (French: [aʁto]; 4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde. He is best known for conceptualizing a 'Theatre of Cruelty'.
- Birthplace: France, Marseille
- Armand Camille Salacrou (9 August 1899 – 23 November 1989) was a French dramatist.
- Birthplace: Rouen, France
Arthur Bernède
Dec. at 66 (1871-1937)Arthur Bernède (5 January 1871 – 20 March 1937) was a French writer, poet, opera libretist, and playwright. He was born in Redon, Ille-et-Vilaine department, in Brittany. In 1919, Bernède joined forces with actor René Navarre, who had played Fantômas in the Louis Feuillade serials, and writer Gaston Leroux, the creator of Rouletabille, to launch the Société des Cinéromans, a production company that would produce films and novels simultaneously. He published almost 200 adventure, mystery, and historical novels. His best-known characters are Belphégor, Judex, Mandrin, and Vidocq. He also collaborated on plays, poems, and opera libretti with Paul de Choudens; including several operas by Félix Fourdrain. Bernède also wrote the libretti for a number of operas, among them Jules Massenet's Sapho and Camille Erlanger's L'Aube rouge.- Birthplace: Redon, France
- Sir Augustus Henry Glossop Harris (18 March 1852 – 22 June 1896) was a British actor, impresario, and dramatist.
- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Benjamin Fondane (French pronunciation: [bɛ̃ʒamɛ̃ fɔ̃dan]) or Benjamin Fundoianu (Romanian pronunciation: [benʒaˈmin fundoˈjanu]; born Benjamin Wechsler, Wexler or Vecsler, first name also Beniamin or Barbu, usually abridged to B.; November 14, 1898 – October 2, 1944) was a Romanian and French poet, critic and existentialist philosopher, also noted for his work in film and theater. Known from his Romanian youth as a Symbolist poet and columnist, he alternated Neoromantic and Expressionist themes with echoes from Tudor Arghezi, and dedicated several poetic cycles to the rural life of his native Moldavia. Fondane, who was of Jewish Romanian extraction and a nephew of Jewish intellectuals Elias and Moses Schwartzfeld, participated in both minority secular Jewish culture and mainstream Romanian culture. During and after World War I, he was active as a cultural critic, avant-garde promoter and, with his brother-in-law Armand Pascal, manager of the theatrical troupe Insula. Fondane began a second career in 1923, when he moved to Paris. Affiliated with Surrealism, but strongly opposed to its communist leanings, he moved on to become a figure in Jewish existentialism and a leading disciple of Lev Shestov. His critique of political dogma, rejection of rationalism, expectation of historical catastrophe and belief in the soteriological force of literature were outlined in his celebrated essays on Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, as well as in his final works of poetry. His literary and philosophical activities helped him build close relationships with other intellectuals: Shestov, Emil Cioran, David Gascoyne, Jacques Maritain, Victoria Ocampo, Ilarie Voronca etc. In parallel, Fondane also had a career in cinema: a film critic and a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures, he later worked on Rapt with Dimitri Kirsanoff, and directed the since-lost film Tararira in Argentina. A prisoner of war during the fall of France, Fondane was released and spent the occupation years in clandestinity. He was eventually captured and handed to Nazi German authorities, who deported him to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was sent to the gas chamber during the last wave of the Holocaust. His work was largely rediscovered later in the 20th century, when it became the subject of scholarly research and public curiosity in both France and Romania. In the latter country, this revival of interest also sparked a controversy over copyright issues.
- Birthplace: Nord-Est, Iași, Romania
Bernard-Marie Koltès
Dec. at 41 (1948-1989)Bernard-Marie Koltès (French: [kɔltɛs]; 9 April 1948 – 15 April 1989) was a French playwright and theatre director best known for his plays La Nuit juste avant les Forêts (The Night Just Before the Forests, 1976), Sallinger (1977) and Dans la Solitude des Champs de Coton (In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, 1986). A close friend and collaborator with the avant-garde director Patrice Chéreau, the two created groundbreaking work together at both the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City and the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre. At the time of his death, Koltès was considered to be one of the most important young voices in French theatre, and heir apparent to the legacy left by post-war playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet. His plays have since become staples on the modern repertory around the world, having been translated into more than 36 languages.- Birthplace: Metz, France
- Boris Vian (French: [bɔʁis vjɑ̃]; 10 March 1920 – 23 June 1959) was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. Today he is remembered primarily for his novels. Those published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan were bizarre parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the time of their release. Vian's other fiction, published under his real name, featured a highly individual writing style with numerous made-up words, subtle wordplay and surrealistic plots. His novel L'Écume des jours (literally: "The Foam of Days") is the best known of these works and one of the few translated into English, under the title of Froth on the Daydream. Vian was also an important influence on the French jazz scene. He served as liaison for Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis in Paris, wrote for several French jazz-reviews (Le Jazz Hot, Paris Jazz) and published numerous articles dealing with jazz both in the United States and in France. His own music and songs enjoyed popularity during his lifetime, particularly the anti-war song "Le Déserteur" (The Deserter).
- Birthplace: Ville-d'Avray, France
- Charles Juliet (born 30 September 1934) in Jujurieux in Ain, is a French poet, playwright and novelist. He won the 2013 Prix Goncourt de la Poésie. His works have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, English, Polish, Japanese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Korean, Chinese, etc...
- Birthplace: Jujurieux, France
Charles Nicolas Favart
Dec. at 56 (1749-1806)Charles Nicolas Joseph Justin Favart (17 March 1749 in Paris – 1 or 2 February 1806) was a French playwright at the Comédie-Italienne for two decades. Favard was also an actor at the Comédie Française for fifteen years. Usually known as Nicolas Favart, formally Charles-Nicolas Favart or C.-N. Favart, he was simply Favart fils (Favart Jr) in his time. Favart was the son of the dramatist, Charles Simon Favart, and was himself a playwright. He wrote a number of successful opéras comiques, such as Le Diable boiteux (1782) and Le Mariage singulier (1787). His son Antoine-Pierre-Charles Favart (1780–1867) was in the diplomatic service, and assisted in editing his grandfather's memoirs; he was a playwright and painter as well.- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Charlotte Delbo, (10 August 1913 – 1 March 1985) was a French writer chiefly known for her haunting memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, where she was sent for her activities as a member of the French resistance.
- Birthplace: Vigneux-sur-Seine, France
- Christine Angot (born 7 February 1959) is a French writer and novelist.
- Birthplace: Châteauroux, France
- Claude Roger-Marx (12 November 1888, Paris – 17 May 1977, Paris), was a French writer, and playwright, as well as an art critic and art historian like his father Roger Marx (1859–1913). He also used the pen name "Claudinet".
- Birthplace: Paris, France
Edmond Gondinet
Dec. at 60 (1828-1888)Edmond Gondinet (7 March 1828 – 19 November 1888) was a French playwright and librettist. This author, nearly forgotten today, produced forty plays of which several were successful. He collaborated with Alphonse Daudet and Eugène Labiche, among others.- Birthplace: Laurière, France
- Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand (UK: , US: , French: [ɛdmɔ̃ ʁɔstɑ̃]; 1 April 1868 – 2 December 1918) was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism and is known best for his play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays contrasted with the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century. Another of Rostand's works, Les Romanesques, was adapted to the musical comedy The Fantasticks.
- Birthplace: Marseille, France
Émile Moreau
Dec. at 81 (1877-1959)Émile Moreau may refer to: Émile Moreau (businessman) (1856 – 1937), French bookseller, publisher and businessman Émile Moreau (playwright) (1852 – 1922), French playwright Émile Moreau (writer) (1877–1959), French playwright and screenwriter Émile Moreau (politician) (1877–1959), Canadian politician Émile Moreau (banker) (1868–1950), French banker Émile Moreau (ichthyologist), French zoologist- Birthplace: Yonne, France
- Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (, also US: , French: [emil zɔla]; 2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was a French novelist, playwright, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse…! Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.
- Birthplace: Paris, France
Emmanuel Théaulon
Dec. at 54 (1787-1841)Marie-Emmanuel-Guillaume-Marguerite Théaulon de Lambert (14 August 1787, Aigues-Mortes – 16 November 1841) was a French playwright. A customs inspector, then an inspector of military hospitals, he composed an Ode on the birth of the King of Rome which brought him thanks from Napoleon himself. In 1814 he sang for the Bourbons and put on his first play, Les Clefs de Paris, ou le Dessert d’Henri IV (The Keys of Paris, or the Deservings of Henry IV), in their honour. In 1815, he composed and organised the posting of proclamations in honour of Louis XVIII. He collaborated on the royalist journals Le Nain rose, La Foudre, L’Apollon.- Birthplace: Aigues-Mortes, France
Eugène Cormon
Dec. at 92 (1810-1903)Pierre-Étienne Piestre, known as Eugène Cormon (5 May 1810 – March 1903), was a French dramatist and librettist. He used his mother's name, Cormon, during his career.Cormon wrote dramas, comedies and, from the 1840s, libretti; around 150 of his works were published. He was stage manager at the Paris Opéra from 1859 to 1870, and administrator of the Théâtre du Vaudeville from 1874. His libretti include Les dragons de Villars (with Lockroy), Gastibelza (with d'Ennery) and Les pêcheurs de Catane (with Carré) for Maillart, Les pêcheurs de perles (with Carré) for Bizet, Robinson Crusoé (with Crémieux) for Offenbach, and Les Bleuets (with Trianon) for Cohen.The Fontainebleau act as well as the auto-da-fé scene of Verdi's opera Don Carlos is based in part on Cormon's 1846 play Philippe II, Roi d'Espagne ("Philip II, King of Spain").At the Moscow Art Theatre in 1927 the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski staged Cormon's melodrama The Gérard Sisters (The Two Orphans), which he co-wrote with Adolphe d'Ennery.- Birthplace: Lyon, France
- Eugène Ionesco (born Eugen Ionescu, Romanian: [e.uˈd͡ʒen i.oˈnesku] (listen); 26 November 1909 – 28 March 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and one of the foremost figures of the French Avant-garde theatre. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict the solitude and insignificance of human existence in a tangible way.
- Birthplace: Sud-Vest, Slatina, Romania
Eugène Marin Labiche
Dec. at 72 (1815-1888)Eugène Marin Labiche (5 May 1815 – 23 January 1888) was a French dramatist, perhaps best known for his 1851 farce written with Marc-Michel, The Italian Straw Hat, which has since been adapted many times to stage and screen.- Birthplace: Paris, France
Félicien Mallefille
Dec. at 55 (1813-1868)Jean Pierre Félicien Mallefille (May 3, 1813 – November 24, 1868) was a French novelist and playwright. Mallefille was born in Mauritius. He wrote a number of plays, including Glenarvon (1835), Les sept enfants de Lara (1836), Le cœur et la dot (1852), and Les sceptiques (1867), as well as two comedies, and two novels, Le collier (1845) and La confession du Gaucho (1868). A farce of his, Les deux veuves, later formed the basis of the libretto for Bedřich Smetana's opera The Two Widows.He also wrote a scenario in French that was to have been the basis of a libretto for the opera Sardanapalo by Franz Liszt, but delivered it so late that Liszt, angered at his unreliability, had commissioned an Italian libretto from another writer; in the end the opera was never completed.Mallefille also had a relationship with George Sand.- Fernando Arrabal Terán (born August 11, 1932) is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist, and poet. He was born in Melilla and settled in France in 1955. Regarding his nationality, Arrabal describes himself as "desterrado", or "half-expatriate, half-exiled". Arrabal has directed seven full-length feature films and has published over 100 plays; 14 novels; 800 poetry collections, chapbooks, and artists' books; several essays; and his notorious "Letter to General Franco" during the dictator's lifetime. His complete plays have been published, in multiple languages, in a two-volume edition totaling over two thousand pages. The New York Times' theatre critic Mel Gussow has called Arrabal the last survivor among the "three avatars of modernism". In 1962, Arrabal co-founded the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, inspired by the god Pan. He was elected Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de Pataphysique in 1990. Forty other Transcendent Satraps have been elected over the past half-century, including Marcel Duchamp, Eugène Ionesco, Man Ray, Boris Vian, Dario Fo, Umberto Eco, and Jean Baudrillard. Arrabal spent three years as a member of André Breton's surrealist group and was a friend of Andy Warhol and Tristan Tzara. Writer and critic Javier Villan wrote of Arrabal:Arrabal's theatre is a wild, brutal, cacophonous, and joyously provocative world. It is a dramatic carnival in which the carcass of our 'advanced' civilizations is barbecued over the spits of a permanent revolution. He is the artistic heir of Kafka's lucidity and Jarry's humor; in his violence, Arrabal is related to Sade and Artaud. Yet he is doubtless the only writer to have pushed derision as far as he did. Deeply political and merrily playful, both revolutionary and bohemian, his work is the syndrome of our century of barbed wire and Gulags, a manner of finding a reprieve.
- Birthplace: Spain, Melilla
- Florence Delay (born 19 March 1941 in Paris) is a French academician and actress.
- Birthplace: France, Paris
- Florian Zeller is a French writer, director, actor, and producer who is best known for writing "The Father" and "The Son." Zeller won an Academy Award in 2021 for the first project.
- Birthplace: Paris, France
François Benoît Hoffmann
Dec. at 67 (1760-1828)François-Benoît Hoffman (11 July 1760 – 25 April 1828) was a French playwright and critic, best known today for his operatic librettos, including those set to music by Étienne Méhul and Luigi Cherubini (most notably Cherubini's Médée, 1797).- Birthplace: Nancy, France
- François Charles Mauriac (French: [moʁjak]; 11 October 1885 – 1 September 1970) was a French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist, a member of the Académie française (from 1933), and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1952). He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1958. He was a lifelong Catholic.
- Birthplace: Bordeaux, France
- Françoise Sagan (born Françoise Quoirez; 21 June 1935 – 24 September 2004) was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Sagan was known for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois characters. Her best-known novel was her first – Bonjour Tristesse (1954) – which was written when she was a teenager.
- Birthplace: Cajarc, France
Frédérick Lemaître
Dec. at 75 (1800-1876)Frédérick Lemaître (28 July 1800 – 26 January 1876) — birth name Antoine Louis Prosper Lemaître — was a French actor and playwright, one of the most famous players on the celebrated Boulevard du Crime.- Birthplace: Le Havre, France
- Gabriel Honoré Marcel (1889–1973) was a French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist. The author of over a dozen books and at least thirty plays, Marcel's work focused on the modern individual's struggle in a technologically dehumanizing society. Though often regarded as the first French existentialist, he dissociated himself from figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, preferring the term philosophy of existence or neo-Socrateanism to define his own thought. The Mystery of Being is a well-known two-volume work authored by Marcel.
- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Gao Xingjian (born January 4, 1940) is a Chinese émigré novelist, playwright, and critic who in 2000 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity." He is also a noted translator (particularly of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco), screenwriter, stage director, and a celebrated painter. In 1998, Gao was granted French citizenship. Gao's drama is considered to be fundamentally absurdist in nature and avant-garde in his native China. His prose works tend to be less celebrated in China but are highly regarded elsewhere in Europe and the West.
- Birthplace: Ganzhou, China
Gaston Arman de Caillavet
Dec. at 46 (1869-1915)Gaston Arman de Caillavet (13 March 1869 – 13 January 1915) was a French playwright.- Birthplace: Paris, France
Gaston Baty
Dec. at 67 (1885-1952)Gaston Baty (26 May 1885 in Pélussin, Loire – 13 October 1952), whose full name was Jean-Baptiste-Marie-Gaston Baty, was a French playwright and theatre director. His stage adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary was presented in an English translation on Broadway in 1937. Constance Cummings played the title role. Baty is also the author of a play entitled Dulcinea, which has been filmed twice and produced on television in 1989. It is an original play that takes its inspiration from Miguel de Cervantes's great novel Don Quixote and uses some of its characters. The second film version, made in 1963, starred Millie Perkins as Dulcinea, and was released in the U.S. as The Girl from La Mancha. He wrote Vie de l'art théatral, des origines a nos jours in 1932 with René Chavance.- Birthplace: Pélussin, France
- Guillaume Apollinaire (French: [ɡijom apɔlinɛʁ]; 26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic of Polish-Belarusian descent. Apollinaire is considered one of the foremost poets of the early 20th century, as well as one of the most impassioned defenders of Cubism and a forefather of Surrealism. He is credited with coining the term "cubism" in 1911 to describe the emerging art movement and the term "surrealism" in 1917 to describe the works of Erik Satie. The term Orphism (1912) is also his. Apollinaire wrote one of the earliest Surrealist literary works, the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917), which became the basis for the 1947 opera Les mamelles de Tirésias. Apollinaire was active as a journalist and art critic for Le Matin, L'Intransigeant, L'Esprit nouveau, Mercure de France, and Paris Journal. In 1912 Apollinaire cofounded Les Soirées de Paris, an artistic and literary magazine. Two years after being wounded in World War I, Apollinaire died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918; he was 38.
- Birthplace: Rome, Italy
- Gustave Flaubert (UK: FLOH-bair, US: floh-BAIR, French: [ɡystav flobɛʁ]; 12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880) was a French novelist. Highly influential, he has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.
- Birthplace: Rouen, France
Hector-Jonathan Crémieux
Dec. at 63 (1828-1892)Hector-Jonathan Crémieux (10 November 1828 – 30 September 1893) was a French librettist and playwright. His best-known work is his collaboration with Ludovic Halévy for Jacques Offenbach's Orphée aux Enfers, known in English as Orpheus in the Underworld.- Birthplace: Paris, France
Henri Bernstein
Dec. at 77 (1876-1953)Henri-Léon-Gustave-Charles Bernstein (20 June 1876 in Paris – 27 November 1953 in Paris) was a French playwright associated with Boulevard theatre.- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Honoré de Balzac ( BAL-zak, more commonly US: BAWL-, French: [ɔnɔʁe d(ə) balzak]; born Honoré Balzac; 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Jack Kerouac, and Henry James, filmmakers Akira Kurosawa, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut as well as important philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films, and they continue to inspire other writers. An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was apprenticed in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie Humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience. Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal drama, and he lost more than one friend over critical reviews. In 1850, Balzac married Ewelina Hańska, a Polish aristocrat and his longtime love; he died in Paris five months later.
- Birthplace: Tours, France
Jacques Deval
Dec. at 77 (1895-1972)Jacques Deval was a screenwriter.- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh (French: [ʒɑ̃ anuj]; 23 June 1910 – 3 October 1987) was a French dramatist whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1944 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's Vichy government. One of France's most prolific writers after World War II, much of Anouilh's work deals with themes of maintaining integrity in a world of moral compromise.
- Birthplace: Bordeaux, France
- Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (French: [ʒɑ̃ kɔkto]; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. Cocteau is best known for his novels Le Grand Écart (1923), Le Livre Blanc (1928), and Les Enfants Terribles (1929); the stage plays La Voix Humaine (1930), La Machine Infernale (1934), Les Parents terribles (1938), La Machine à écrire (1941), and L'Aigle à deux têtes (1946); and the films The Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents Terribles (1948), from his own eponymous piéce, Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orpheus (1949), and Testament of Orpheus (1960), which alongside Blood of a Poet and Orpheus constitute the so-called Orphic Trilogy. He was described as "one of [the] avant-garde's most successful and influential filmmakers" by AllMovie.
- Birthplace: Maisons-Laffitte, France
- Jean Genet (French: [ʒɑ̃ ʒənɛ]; (1910-12-19)19 December 1910 – (1986-04-15)15 April 1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later took to writing. His major works include the novels The Thief's Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Maids and The Screens.
- Birthplace: France, Paris
- Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux (French: [ʒiʁodu]; 29 October 1882 – 31 January 1944) was a French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright. He is considered among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II. His work is noted for its stylistic elegance and poetic fantasy. Giraudoux's dominant theme is the relationship between man and woman—or in some cases, between man and some unattainable ideal.
- Birthplace: Bellac, France
Jean Gruault
Age: 100Jean Gruault (3 August 1924 – 8 June 2015) was a French screenwriter and actor. He wrote 25 films between 1960 and 1995. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for the 1980 film Mon oncle d'Amérique. He was born in Fontenay-sous-Bois, Paris.- Birthplace: Fontenay-sous-Bois, France
- Jean Poiret, born Jean Poiré, (17 August 1926 – 14 March 1992) was a French actor, director, and screenwriter. He is primarily known as the author of the original play La Cage Aux Folles.
- Birthplace: France, Paris
- Jean Racine (French: [ʒɑ̃ ʁasin]), baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine (22 December 1639 – 21 April 1699), was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille, and an important literary figure in the Western tradition. Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing such "examples of neoclassical perfection" as Phèdre, Andromaque, and Athalie. He did write one comedy, Les Plaideurs, and a muted tragedy, Esther for the young. Racine's plays displayed his mastery of the dodecasyllabic (12 syllable) French alexandrine. His writing is renowned for its elegance, purity, speed, and fury, and for what American poet Robert Lowell described as a "diamond-edge", and the "glory of its hard, electric rage". Racine's dramaturgy is marked by his psychological insight, the prevailing passion of his characters, and the nakedness of both plot and stage. The linguistic effects of Racine's poetry are widely considered to be untranslatable, although many eminent poets have attempted to translate Racine's work into English, including Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, and Derek Mahon, and Friedrich Schiller into German. The latest translations of Racine's plays into English have been by Alan Hollinghurst (Berenice, Bajazet), by RADA director Edward Kemp (Andromache), Neil Bartlett, and poet Geoffrey Alan Argent, who earned a 2011 American Book Award for the translating The Complete Plays of Jean Racine.
- Birthplace: La Ferté-Milon, France
Jean Rotrou
Dec. at 40 (1609-1650)Jean Rotrou (21 August 1609 – 28 June 1650) was a French poet and tragedian.- Birthplace: Dreux, France
Jean-Claude Grumberg
Age: 86Jean-Claude Grumberg (born 1939) is a French writer of children's books and a playwright.- Birthplace: Paris, France
Jean-François Bayard
Dec. at 56 (1796-1853)Jean-François Alfred Bayard (17 March 1796, Charolles, Saône-et-Loire – 20 February 1853, Paris) was a French playwright. He was the nephew of fellow playwright Eugène Scribe.- Birthplace: Charolles, France
Jean-Louis Fuzelier
Dec. at 80 (1672-1752)Louis Fuzelier (also Fuselier, Fusellier, Fusillier, Fuzellier; 1672 or 1674 – 19 September 1752) was a French playwright. Fuzelier was born and died in Paris. He wrote more than 200 plays for the Théâtre de la foire (theatres of the fair), alone or in collaboration with Alain-René Lesage, Alexis Piron or Jacques-Philippe d'Orneval. Fuzelier wrote the libretto to Les Fêtes grecques et romaines, a ballet héroïque with music by François Colin de Blamont (1723) and to Les Indes galantes, an opéra-ballet with music by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1735), both performed in Paris at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal by the Académie Royale de Musique. Fuzelier also wrote some works for the Comédie-Française and was one of the principal editors of the Mercure de France, from 1721 to 1724 and from 1744 to 1752.- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, US also ; French: [saʁtʁ]; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Sartre was also noted for his open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honours and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution".
- Birthplace: France, Paris
Jean-Pierre Grédy
Age: 104Jean-Pierre Grédy is a French playwright.- Birthplace: Alexandria, Egypt
Jean-Pierre Sarrazac
Age: 79Jean-Pierre Sarrazac (born 1946) is a French playwright, stage director, drama trainer and university teacher. In his works he has been influenced by Bernard Dort. He has published several studies and books on drama and dramaturgy. He directed several plays by playwrights Valère Novarina, Strindberg, von Saaz and himself. Jean-Pierre Sarrazac is an emeritus professor of theatre studies at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle and invited professor at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium).Jean-Richard Bloch
Dec. at 62 (1884-1947)Jean-Richard Bloch (May 25, 1884 – March 15, 1947) was a French critic, novelist and playwright. He was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) and worked with Louis Aragon in the evening daily Ce soir.- Birthplace: Paris, France
Joseph Isidore Samson
Dec. at 77 (1793-1871)Joseph Isidore Samson (2 July 1793 – 28 March 1871) was a 19th-century French actor and playwright.Joseph-François Duché de Vancy
Dec. at 36 (1668-1704)Joseph-François Duché de Vancy (29 October 1668, Paris - 14 December 1704) was a French playwright.- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Jules Henri Saiset (July 11, 1925 – July 12, 1995) was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist, novelist, and critic. Saiset was born in Paris. When he was 15 months old, his father died of a fever.
Léon Gozlan
Dec. at 63 (1803-1866)Léon Gozlan (11 September 1803 – 14 September 1866) was a 19th-century French novelist and playwright. When he was still a boy, his father, who had made a large fortune as a ship-broker, met with a series of misfortunes, and Léon, before completing his education, had to go to sea in order to earn a living. In 1828 we find him in Paris, determined to run the risks of literary life. His townsman, Joseph Méry, who was then making himself famous by his political satires, introduced him to several newspapers, and Gozlan's brilliant articles in Le Figaro did much harm to the already tottering government of Charles X.- Birthplace: Marseille, France
Louis de Cahusac
Dec. at 53 (1706-1759)Louis de Cahusac (6 April 1706 – 22 June 1759) was an 18th-century French playwright and librettist, and Freemason, most famous for his work with the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. He provided the libretti for several of Rameau's operas, namely Les fêtes de l'Hymen et de l'Amour (1747), Zaïs (1748), Naïs (1749), Zoroastre (1749; revised 1756), La naissance d'Osiris (1754), and Anacréon (the first of Rameau's operas by that name, 1754). He is also credited with writing the libretto of Rameau's final work, Les Boréades (c. 1763). Cahusac contributed to the Encyclopédie and was the lover of Marie Fel.In 1754, he published La Danse ancienne et moderne ou Traité historique de la danse (The Hague, Jean Neaulme). Among Rameau's librettists, he was the one whose collaboration lasted the longest; the composer was having a very bad character and he was also very stingy: only Cahusac managed to agree with him permanently.- Birthplace: Montauban, France
Ludovic Halévy
Dec. at 74 (1834-1908)Ludovic Halévy (1 January 1834 – 7 May 1908) was a French author and playwright, best known for his collaborations with Henri Meilhac on Georges Bizet's Carmen and on the works of Jacques Offenbach.- Birthplace: Paris, France
Marc Camoletti
Dec. at 79 (1923-2003)Marc Camoletti (November 16, 1923 – July 18, 2003) was a French playwright best known for his classic farce Boeing-Boeing. Camoletti was born a French citizen in Geneva, Switzerland, though his family had Italian origins. His theatrical career began in 1958 when three of his plays were presented simultaneously in Paris, the first, La Bonne Anna, running for 1300 performances and going on to play throughout the world. Boeing-Boeing (1962) was an even greater success, and remains Camoletti's signature hit. The original London production, in an adaptation by Beverley Cross, opened at the Apollo Theatre, transferred to the Duchess, and ran for seven years, racking up more than 2,000 performances. A later play, Don't Dress for Dinner, also ran for seven years in London, again transferring from the Apollo to the Duchess. Camoletti's plays have been performed in numerous languages in 55 countries. In Paris alone, 18 of his plays have totalled around 20,000 performances in all. Ten of his plays have also been shown on television, the most recent being Sexe et Jalousie. In 1979, he directed his only feature film, Duos sur canapé, based on one of his plays. Camoletti was an Associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. He was awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, one of France's highest honours. He died in Deauville on the Normandy coast in 2003.- Birthplace: Geneva, Switzerland
- Marcel Achard (5 July 1899 – 4 September 1974) was a French playwright and screenwriter whose popular sentimental comedies maintained his position as a highly recognizable name in his country's theatrical and literary circles for five decades. He was elected to the Académie française in 1959.
- Birthplace: France, Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon
- Marcel Pagnol is often dismissed in film histories as an author of "canned theater" whose appeal is limited to a certain regional quaintness. This attitude is partly due to the fact that he first found fame as a playwright, but Pagnol did play a central role in developing and popularizing sound film in France. At a time when the French film industry was being radically transformed by the introduction of sound, Pagnol emerged as a major writer, director and producer of hugely successful films. Like Sacha Guitry, another homme du theatre with whom he is often compared, Pagnol initially assigned film a dubious artistic status, but once he became interested in the medium, he abandoned the theater altogether and in 1933 founded his own production company, Les Societe des Films Marcel Pagnol. In the process Pagnol became one of the few French directors of the period to control virtually every aspect of film production.
- Birthplace: Aubagne, France
- Marie NDiaye (born 4 June 1967) is a French novelist and playwright. She published her first novel, Quant au riche avenir, when she was 17. She won the Prix Goncourt in 2009. Her play Papa doit manger is the sole play by a living female writer to be part of the repertoire of the Comédie française.
- Birthplace: Pithiviers, France
Maurice Magre
Dec. at 64 (1877-1941)Maurice Magre is a writer.- Birthplace: Toulouse, France
Michel Baron
Dec. at 76 (1653-1729)Michel Baron (8 October 1653 – 22 December 1729) was a French actor and playwright.- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (baptised 15 January 1622; died 17 February 1673), known by his stage name Molière (UK: , US: , French: [mɔljɛʁ]), was a French playwright, actor and poet, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in the French language and universal literature. His extant works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets and more. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed at the Comédie-Française more often than those of any other playwright today. His influence is such that the French language itself is often referred to as the "language of Molière".Born into a prosperous family and having studied at the Collège de Clermont (now Lycée Louis-le-Grand), Molière was well suited to begin a life in the theatre. Thirteen years as an itinerant actor helped him polish his comic abilities while he began writing, combining Commedia dell'arte elements with the more refined French comedy.Through the patronage of aristocrats including Philippe I, Duke of Orléans—the brother of Louis XIV—Molière procured a command performance before the King at the Louvre. Performing a classic play by Pierre Corneille and a farce of his own, The Doctor in Love, Molière was granted the use of salle du Petit-Bourbon near the Louvre, a spacious room appointed for theatrical performances. Later, he was granted the use of the theatre in the Palais-Royal. In both locations Molière found success among Parisians with plays such as The Affected Ladies, The School for Husbands and The School for Wives. This royal favour brought a royal pension to his troupe and the title Troupe du Roi ("The King's Troupe"). Molière continued as the official author of court entertainments.Despite the adulation of the court and Parisians, Molière's satires attracted criticism from churchmen. For Tartuffe's impiety, the Catholic Church denounced this study of religious hypocrisy followed by the Parliament's ban, while Don Juan was withdrawn and never restaged by Molière. His hard work in so many theatrical capacities took its toll on his health and, by 1667, he was forced to take a break from the stage. In 1673, during a production of his final play, The Imaginary Invalid, Molière, who suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis, was seized by a coughing fit and a haemorrhage while playing the hypochondriac Argan. He finished the performance but collapsed again and died a few hours later.
- Birthplace: Paris, France
Nicolas Chamfort
Dec. at 53 (1741-1794)Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, known in his adult life as Nicolas Chamfort and as Sébastien Nicolas de Chamfort (French: [ʃɑ̃fɔʁ]; 6 April 1741 – 13 April 1794), was a French writer, best known for his witty epigrams and aphorisms. He was secretary to Louis XVI's sister, and of the Jacobin club.- Birthplace: Clermont-Ferrand, France
- Octave Mirbeau (16 February 1848 – 16 February 1917) was a French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde. His work has been translated into thirty languages.
- Birthplace: Trévières, France
Pascale Roze
Age: 71Pascale Roze (born 1954 Saïgon, Vietnam) is a French playwright, and novelist. After a literature degree, she worked for fifteen years with Gabriel Garran International French Theater.- Birthplace: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Paul Féval, père
Dec. at 70 (1816-1887)Paul Henri Corentin Féval, père (29 September 1816 - 8 March 1887) was a French novelist and dramatist. He was the author of popular swashbuckler novels such as Le Loup blanc (1843) and the perennial best-seller Le Bossu (1857). He also penned the seminal vampire fiction novels Le Chevalier Ténèbre (1860), La Vampire (1865) and La Ville Vampire (1874) and wrote several celebrated novels about his native Brittany and Mont Saint-Michel such as La Fée des Grèves (1850). Féval's greatest claim to fame, however, is as one of the fathers of modern crime fiction. Because of its themes and characters, his novel Jean Diable (1862) can claim to be the world's first modern novel of detective fiction. His masterpiece was Les Habits Noirs (1863–1875), a criminal saga comprising eleven novels. After losing his fortune in a financial scandal, Féval became a born-again Christian, stopped writing crime thrillers, and began to write religious novels, leaving the tale of the Habits Noirs uncompleted.- Birthplace: Rennes, France
Paul Hervieu
Dec. at 57 (1857-1915)Paul Hervieu (2 September 1857 – 25 October 1915) was a French novelist and playwright.- Birthplace: Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, France
Paul Raynal
Dec. at 86 (1885-1971)Paul Raynal is a writer.- Paul Verdier (died 6 September 2015) was a stage director, actor, and playwright, who also had a number of guest parts in American television. He was married to Sonia Lloveras-Verdier. Before moving to the United States, Verdier was a member of the Paris-based repertory companies of Jean-Louis Barrault/Madeleine Renaud and Nicolas Bataille. Verdier and his wife opened the Stages Theatre Center in Hollywood in 1982, as a venue for bringing "the richness, flavor and variety of World Theatre to Los Angeles audiences".In 1986, the couple opened a French restaurant—Cafe des Artistes—next door to the theatre.
- Philippe, Baron de Rothschild (13 April 1902 – 20 January 1988) was a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty who became a Grand Prix race-car driver, a screenwriter and playwright, a theatrical producer, a film producer, a poet, and one of the most successful wine growers in the world.
- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Philippe Hériat (15 September 1898 in Paris – 10 October 1971) was a multi-talented French novelist, playwright and actor.
- Birthplace: France, Paris
Pierre Barillet
Age: 101Pierre Barillet is a playwright.- Birthplace: Paris, France
Pierre Carmouche
Dec. at 70 (1797-1868)Pierre Carmouche (9 April 1797 - 9 December 1868) was a French playwright and chansonnier. He wrote more than 200 successful plays, comedies, comédies en vaudevilles and texts for opéras comiques, in collaboration with diverse authors - Brazier, Dumersan, Mélesville, de Courcy, etc. In 1824 he married the actress Jenny Vertpré. He also collected a rich library, bequeathed in part to marshal Canrobert.- Birthplace: Lyon, France
- Pierre Corneille (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ kɔʁnɛj]; Rouen, 6 June 1606 – Paris, 1 October 1684) was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine. As a young man, he earned the valuable patronage of Cardinal Richelieu, who was trying to promote classical tragedy along formal lines, but later quarrelled with him, especially over his best-known play, Le Cid, about a medieval Spanish warrior, which was denounced by the newly formed Académie française for breaching the unities. He continued to write well-received tragedies for nearly forty years.
- Birthplace: Rouen, France
- Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (French: [pjɛʁ bomaʁʃe]; 24 January 1732 – 18 May 1799) was a French polymath. At various times in his life, he was a watchmaker, inventor, playwright, musician, diplomat, spy, publisher, horticulturist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American). Born a provincial watchmaker's son, Beaumarchais rose in French society and became influential in the court of Louis XV as an inventor and music teacher. He made a number of important business and social contacts, played various roles as a diplomat and spy, and had earned a considerable fortune before a series of costly court battles jeopardized his reputation. An early French supporter of American independence, Beaumarchais lobbied the French government on behalf of the American rebels during the American War of Independence. Beaumarchais oversaw covert aid from the French and Spanish governments to supply arms and financial assistance to the rebels in the years before France's formal entry into the war in 1778. He later struggled to recover money he had personally invested in the scheme. Beaumarchais was also a participant in the early stages of the French Revolution. He is probably best known, however, for his theatrical works, especially the three Figaro plays.
- Birthplace: Paris, France
Pierre-Antoine-Augustin de Piis
Dec. at 76 (1755-1832)Pierre-Antoine-Augustin (17 September 1755, Paris – 22 May 1832, Paris), chevalier de Piis was a French dramatist and man of letters. With Pierre-Yves Barré he was one of the co-founders of Paris's Théâtre du Vaudeville. He was the son of Pierre-Joseph de Piis, chevalier de Saint-Louis and major to the Cap Français, and as such was intended for service in France's colonial army. However, due to his delicate health, he gave up the military and completed at the collège d'Harcourt the studies he had begun at the Louis le-Grand.- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Robert de Flers (Robert Pellevé de La Motte-Ango, marquis de Flers) (25 November 1872, Pont-l'Évêque, Calvados – 30 July 1927, Vittel) was a French playwright, opera librettist, and journalist.He entered the Lycée Condorcet in 1888 where he studied law with the initial ambition of entering diplomatic service. He met and befriended fellow student and writer Marcel Proust, and that relationship had a great influence upon him. Proust exposed Flers to art, literature, and music and his interests soon switched from law to writing, journalism, and literature. The two men enjoyed a lifelong friendship.After completing his studies, he toured throughout Asia in the mid-1890s. The event inspired his earliest writings: the novel La Courtisane Taïa et son singe vert (1896), the short story Ilsée, princesse de Tripoli (1896), and the travel narrative Vers l’Orient (1897). Upon returning to Paris, he was approached by composer Edmond Audran to write the libretto for his operetta La reine des reines. The worked premiered on 14 October 1896 at the Théâtre de l'Eldorado in Strasbourg. His next libretto was for Gaston Serpette's vaudeville-operetta Shakspeare! which premiered at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens on 23 November 1899.In 1901 de Flers married Geneviève Sardou, the daughter of Victorien Sardou. He continued to be active writing librettos. His third opera libretto, Les travaux d'Hercule (1901), marked his first collaboration with fellow playwright Gaston Arman de Caillavet and composer Claude Terrasse. Most of his remaining librettos were written with Caillavet, often for Terrasse who was their most frequent musical collaborator. Other composers for which the two men wrote librettos include André Messager, and Gabriel Pierné. The two men also wrote a French translation of Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow in 1905 which was used throughout France during the first half of the 20th century. Their last opera collaboration was for Alfred Bruneau's 1923 opera Le jardin du paradis. De Flers also wrote the librettos for Reynaldo Hahn's Ciboulette (1923) with playwright Francis de Croisset, and Joseph Szulc's Le petit choc (1923).De Flers and de Caillavet also often worked together on stage plays, producing such comedies as Le Sire de Vergy (1903), Les Sentiers de la vertu (1903), Pâris ou le bon juge (1906), Miquette et sa mère (1906), Primerose (1911), and L’Habit vert (1913) among other works. He later worked frequently with playwright Francis de Croisset, producing such works as Les Vignes du seigneur (1923), Les Nouveaux Messieurs (1925), and Le Docteur miracle (1926). Although a number of his operas were successful in his day, his lasting legacy rests in his stage plays.De Flers was a member of the Académie française from 1920 up until his death in 1927. He spent the last six years of his life as literary editor of Le Figaro, a position he was appointed to in 1921. He also served as the Conseiller Général of Lozère during his latter years.
- Birthplace: Pont-l'Évêque, France
- Romain Rolland (French: [ʁɔlɑ̃]; 29 January 1866 – 30 December 1944) was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings".He was a leading supporter of Stalinism in France and is also noted for his correspondence with and influence on Sigmund Freud.
- Birthplace: Clamecy, Nièvre, Nevers, France
- Alexandre-Pierre Georges "Sacha" Guitry (French: [gitʁi]; 21 February 1885 – 24 July 1957) was a French stage actor, film actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright of the Boulevard theatre. He was the son of a leading French actor, Lucien Guitry, and followed his father into the theatrical profession. He became known for his stage performances, often in boulevardier roles, in the many plays he wrote, of which there were more than 120. He was married five times, always to rising actresses whose careers he furthered. Probably his best-known wife was Yvonne Printemps to whom he was married between 1919 and 1932. Guitry's plays range from historical dramas to contemporary light comedies. Some have musical scores, by composers including André Messager and Reynaldo Hahn. When silent films became popular Guitry avoided them, finding the lack of spoken dialogue fatal to dramatic impact. From the 1930s to the end of his life he enthusiastically embraced the cinema, making as many as five films in a single year. The later years of Guitry's career were overshadowed by accusations of collaborating with the occupying Germans after the capitulation of France in the Second World War. The charges were dismissed, but Guitry, a strongly patriotic man, was disillusioned by the vilification by some of his compatriots. By the time of his death his popular esteem had been restored to the extent that 12,000 people filed past his coffin before his burial in Paris.
- Birthplace: Saint Petersburg, Russia
- Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both English and French. Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humor, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd."Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation." He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
- Birthplace: Foxrock, Ireland
Samuel Chappuzeau
Dec. at 76 (1625-1701)Samuel Chappuzeau (16 June 1625, Paris – 31 August 1701) was a French scholar, author, poet and playwright whose best-known work today is Le Théâtre François, a description of French Theatre in the seventeenth century. Chappuzeau’s play Le Cercle des Femmes is widely regarded as one of the main sources for Molière’s masterpiece Les Précieuses Ridicules, but his influence on the "Golden Age of French Drama" has in the past been seriously underestimated. Among other things, Chappuzeau played a substantial part in "discovering" Molière when he gave his travelling troupe a glowing review in his book Lyon dans son lustre in 1656. Chappuzeau is credited with a number of "firsts," including being the first writer to introduce satire to French farce, and the first to set a play in China. Later, he composed Tavernier's famous travel guides from notes and dictation, though this task seems to have been forced upon him, much against his will, by the King (Louis XIV). Chappuzeau also wrote sermons, odes, dictionaries, and geographical books, and was still working on his Nouveau Dictionaire almost up to his death.- Birthplace: Paris, France
Sotha
Age: 81Sotha (born 1944) is a French actress, playwright, screenwriter, film & stage director, and composer. Her real name is Catherine Sigaux. She was one of the founders of the Café de la Gare where she acted and co-wrote many of the plays.She was twice married, both times to fellow actors from the Café de la Gare, first to Romain Bouteille, and then for 11 years to Patrick Dewaere. She is the daughter of novelist and journalist Gilbert Sigaux.In 1981 Sotha published a novel in comic book format whose title roughly translates as "Look to the sky, it's going to rain." In 2002, she wrote a play, Le Brave Soldat Chvéïk s'en va au Ciel (The Good Soldier Schweik goes to Heaven), based on the famous satirical novel The Good Soldier Švejk by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek.- Birthplace: France, Rozay-en-Brie
- Sylvain Itkine was an actor, theater director, and playwright.
- Birthplace: Paris, France
Timothée de Fombelle
Age: 52Timothee de Fombelle is a writer.- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Tristan Bernard (7 September 1866 – 7 December 1947) was a French playwright, novelist, journalist and lawyer.
- Birthplace: Besançon, France
Victor Haïm
Age: 90Victor Haïm is an actor, screenwriter and playwright.- Birthplace: Asnières-sur-Seine, France
- Victor Hugo was a writer who was known for writing "Les Misérables," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and "Les Miserables."
- Birthplace: Besançon, Doubs, France
Victor Séjour
Dec. at 57 (1817-1874)Juan Victor Séjour Marcou et Ferrand (2 June 1817 – 20 September 1874) was an American expatriate writer who worked in France. Though mostly unknown to later American writers, his short story "Le Mulâtre" ("The Mulatto") is the earliest known work of fiction by a Creole author.- Birthplace: New Orleans, Louisiana
Victorien Sardou
Dec. at 77 (1831-1908)Victorien Sardou ( sar-DOO, French: [viktɔʁjɛ̃ saʁdu]; 5 September 1831 – 8 November 1908) was a French dramatist. He is best remembered today for his development, along with Eugène Scribe, of the well-made play. He also wrote several plays that were made into popular 19th-century operas such as La Tosca (1887) on which Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca (1900) is based, and Fédora (1882) and Madame Sans-Gêne (1893) that provided the subjects for the lyrical dramas Fedora (1898) and Madame Sans-Gêne (1915) by Umberto Giordano.- Birthplace: Paris, France
- François-Marie Arouet (French: [fʁɑ̃swa maʁi aʁwɛ]; 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire (; also US: , French: [vɔltɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, as well as his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.
- Birthplace: Paris, France
- William Somerset Maugham, CH ( MAWM; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965), better known as W. Somerset Maugham, was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s.Both Maugham's parents died before he was 10, and he was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. He did not want to become a lawyer like other men in his family, so he trained and qualified as a physician. The initial run of his first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) sold out so rapidly that he gave up medicine to write full-time. During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he travelled in India and Southeast Asia, and those experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.
- Birthplace: France, Paris
- Yasmina Reza (born 1 May 1959) is a French playwright, actress, novelist and screenwriter best known for her plays 'Art' and God of Carnage. Many of her brief satiric plays have reflected on contemporary middle-class issues.
- Birthplace: France, Paris
Zacharie Jacob
Dec. at 77 (1590-1667)Zacharie Jacob (died 1667), known as Montfleury, was a famed French actor and playwright of the 17th century. Jacob was born in Anjou during the last years of the 16th century. He was enrolled as one of the pages to the duc de Guise, but he ran away to join some strolling players, assuming the stage name of Montfleury. About 1635, he was a valued member of the company at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and he was in the original cast of the Cid (1636) and of Horace (1640). Richelieu thought highly of him, and when in 1638, Montfleury married the actress Jeanne de la Chalpe (d. 1683), the cardinal desired the ceremony to take place at his own country house at Rueil.He was the author of a tragedy, La Mort d'Asdrobal, performed in 1647. His son, Antoine Jacob, who was also known as Montfleury, was a rival of Molière and Cyrano de Bergerac. Both father and son feuded with Molière. Zacharie was mocked for his girth in a Molière play, to which Antoine responded with one mocking Molière. Shortly before his death, Zacharie denounced Molière to King Louis XIV as having committed incest, a rumor which has never gone away. Montfleury died in Paris from the rupture of a blood-vessel, while playing the part of Orestes in Andromaque, in December 1667. It is believed that a metal belt he used to support his enormous belly was the cause.