Jean Cocteau’s most famous piece of work is his novel, Les Enfants Terribles, which was written in three weeks in March 1929, during a period of opium rehabilitation. [1]
Jean Cocteau was a French poet, playwright, artist, film director, actor, sculptor, designer and publicity agent. His talents were so versatile that they were described as ‘dizzying’. He was also homosexual, a smoker of opium and a highly paradoxical figure.
Cocteau helped ‘invent’ the image of Paris in the 1920s. He was in the forefront of most of the ‘isms’ of the 20th century (from surrealism, modernism, to Dadaism), and was hugely enthusiastic about life. He packed a huge amount into his life: “Since the age of fifteen, I haven’t stopped for a minute”.
Jean Cocteau knew everyone – Picasso, Diaghilev, Modigliani, Jacques-Emile Blanche, Edith Piaf, Edith Wharton, Man Ray, Charlie Chaplin, Colette, Proust, Ezra Pound, Roland Garros, Cecil Beaton, Nikinsky, Stravinsky, Gide, Gertrude Stein and Chanel.
Deeply depressed for much of his adult life Cocteau used art making, along with opium, as a means of coping with this. His work is indicative of his struggles, regularly exploring the possibility that creativity itself is inseparable from despair. Though his body of work encompassed many different mediums, Cocteau insisted on calling himself a poet.
In 1955 Cocteau was elected to L’Académie française, and to the Royal Academy of Belgium.
He died from a heart attack on 11 October 1963, aged 74, while at his country home at Milly-la-Forêt after hearing the news of the death of his friend, the singer Edith Piaf. He was buried in the nearby chapel, which he had also decorated, and his epitaph is ‘Je reste avec vous’ (‘I remain with you’).