"I am a lie that always tells the truth.", Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau (July 5, 1889 – October 11, 1963) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, draftsman, designer, and visual artist, and one of the most prolific and protean figures of twentieth-century European modernism. Born in Maisons-Laffitte outside Paris and educated at the Lycée Condorcet, he emerged in the years before the First World War as a young writer at the centre of the Parisian avant-garde, working in close collaboration with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes — the 1917 ballet Parade, with sets by Picasso and music by Erik Satie, was conceived as Cocteau's project, and continued for the next half-century to move with extraordinary fluency between literature, theatre, cinema, and the visual arts.
His major writing, including the novels Les Enfants terribles (1929) and Le Grand Écart (1923) and the plays Les Parents terribles (1938) and La Voix humaine (1930), placed him among the leading French writers of the interwar period. His films, Le Sang d'un poète (1930), La Belle et la Bête (1946), Orphée (1950), and Le Testament d'Orphée(1960), are among the foundational works of European avant-garde cinema. As a visual artist he produced a substantial body of drawings, paintings, ceramics, tapestries, and decorative work, including the frescoes of the Chapelle Saint-Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer, the decoration of the Salle des Mariages of the Menton city hall, the Chapelle Saint-Blaise-des-Simples in Milly-la-Forêt, and the Villa Santo Sospir in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. He was elected to the Académie française in 1955.