48 Fun Facts About Jean Cocteau

In the 1930s Cocteau coaxed a faded former world champion back to the top of which sport?

Boxing: he found the Panamanian bantamweight Al Brown performing in a Paris cabaret, got him off drugs and back into training, and saw him win a world title again.

Which nickname of the young Cocteau in bohemian Paris was also the title of his second book of poems?

The Frivolous Prince was the title of his 1910 collection; within a few years he had turned his back on such salon verse and thrown in his lot with the avant-garde.

What did Cocteau do during the First World War?

Drove an ambulance: turned down by the army on health grounds, he reached the Belgian front with a volunteer medical convoy and later set his novel Thomas the Impostor there.

Which impresario persuaded Cocteau to write the scenario for the ballet Parade?

Sergei Diaghilev had earlier brushed off the eager young poet with two words, 'Astonish me', and Cocteau treated the dare as his artistic programme for the rest of his life.

Who designed the sets and costumes for Cocteau's ballet Parade in 1917?

Pablo Picasso joined the company in Rome to prepare the designs and there fell for one of its dancers, Olga Khokhlova, whom he married the following year.

Which poet coined the word 'surrealism' in his programme note for Cocteau's ballet Parade?

Guillaume Apollinaire called the ballet 'a kind of surrealism' in 1917; André Breton later took the word for his own movement, which wanted nothing to do with Cocteau.

Which group of composers did Cocteau champion in the 1920s?

Les Six owed their name to a critic who in 1920 set them beside Russia's 'Five'; Cocteau made himself their spokesman, though the six had little in common and soon went separate ways.

Which member of the group Cocteau championed was Swiss rather than French?

Arthur Honegger was in fact born in France, at Le Havre, but to Swiss parents whose nationality he kept; his orchestral piece Pacific 231 portrays a steam locomotive in motion.

Which fashionable 1920s Paris bar took its name from a ballet-farce that Cocteau had staged?

Le Boeuf sur le Toit had been the Gaya, a bar where Cocteau and his friends were regulars, until its owner moved premises and renamed it after the ballet.

Cocteau's play The Eagle with Two Heads, about a queen and her would-be assassin, drew on which murdered empress?

Elisabeth of Austria, stabbed by an assassin while out walking in Geneva, gave him the reclusive queen, while the castle-haunting Ludwig II of Bavaria supplied the play's atmosphere.

What was the title of Radiguet's autobiographical novel of adultery that Cocteau got published?

Le Diable au corps ('The Devil in the Flesh') has a schoolboy seduce a young wife whose husband is away at the front, much as the teenage Radiguet had done himself during the war.

What killed Cocteau's young protégé Raymond Radiguet in December 1923?

Typhoid fever killed him at twenty, months after his first novel had made him famous; the second, already written, could only be published after his death.

In which foreign capital did Cocteau paint the murals of a French church's chapel in little more than a week?

London: the French church of Notre Dame de France, off Leicester Square, gave him its Lady Chapel, and he drew the Annunciation, Crucifixion and Assumption straight onto the wall.

To which drug did Cocteau become addicted in the 1920s?

Opium took hold of him in the months after Radiguet's death and kept its grip for years: he twice had to enter a clinic to be weaned off it.

In Cocteau's film Orpheus, the elegant Princess who arrives in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce turns out to be who?

Death, in Cocteau's telling, falls in love with the poet she has come for, turning the old myth into a love triangle of husband, wife and Death.

Which Catholic philosopher visited Cocteau during a drug cure and drew him back to the Church for a time?

Jacques Maritain led him back to the sacraments in 1925, but the conversion did not hold: within a few years Cocteau had drifted away from the Church again.

For which composer did Cocteau write the text of a 1927 opera-oratorio that was then translated into Latin?

Igor Stravinsky wanted a language 'not dead but turned to stone', so Cocteau's French text was put into Latin for the singers, while a narrator explains the plot to the audience in their own tongue.

Cocteau's 1934 play La Machine infernale retells which legend?

Oedipus is the mortal caught in the title's 'infernal machine', a trap the gods have wound up for his destruction; the play is usually counted Cocteau's finest work for the stage.

Cocteau's play La Voix humaine became a 1958 opera by which composer?

Francis Poulenc set the play, one woman's last telephone call to the lover who is leaving her, for a single soprano alone on stage, and Cocteau himself directed the premiere.

In 1936 Cocteau set off on which journey for the newspaper Paris-Soir?

Around the world in 80 days: he and his companion Marcel Khill set out to match the timetable of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, and he sent the paper reports along the way.

Which viscount gave Cocteau a million francs to make The Blood of a Poet?

Charles de Noailles, who also paid for Buñuel's L'Âge d'Or, was filmed with his wife as a theatre audience and was horrified to find the finished film had them applauding a suicide.

Which American photographer plays the statue that comes to life in Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet?

Lee Miller was then known as Man Ray's model, pupil and lover; a decade later she was photographing the Second World War from the front line for Vogue.

Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy is made up of Orpheus, Testament of Orpheus and which earlier film?

The Blood of a Poet opens the trilogy thirty years before it ends, and all of its dream episodes are framed as happening in the instant it takes a factory chimney to fall.

Who played the Beast in Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast?

Jean Marais plays three parts: the Beast, Belle's swaggering suitor Avenant, and the Prince the Beast turns into, who turns out to have the suitor's face.

In Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, what guides Belle's father through the castle?

An enchanted candelabra: the castle's lights are held by living human arms that reach out of the walls, while its statues turn their eyes to follow whoever passes.

In Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, what rises from the Beast's hands after he has killed?

Smoke curls from his fingers after a kill, and he hides them from Belle in shame, a rule of this fairy-tale world that Cocteau spells out in the film's opening words.

Which composer turned Cocteau's film Beauty and the Beast into an opera in 1994?

Philip Glass stripped out the film's soundtrack and wrote new music to be sung live while it is projected, timing every word to the actors' lips on the screen.

In Cocteau's Orpheus, how do characters cross from the world of the living into the underworld?

Through a mirror: the tricks are simple ones done on the set, such as a tank of liquid standing in for the glass when a gloved hand sinks into it.

In Cocteau's Orpheus, cryptic verse reaches the poet through what?

A car radio: he sits in the Rolls-Royce hidden in his garage listening for its messages, far more absorbed in them than in his neglected wife.

In Cocteau's film Orpheus, where does the hero first cross paths with the Princess, minutes before a fatal brawl?

The Café des Poètes: a drunken young rival, Cégeste, starts a fight there and is run down by two motorcyclists, and the Princess orders Orpheus into her car as a witness.

Who plays the 18th-century poet adrift in time at the centre of Cocteau's last film, Testament of Orpheus?

The director himself, then seventy, wanders through his own inventions in 18th-century dress and is run through by a goddess's spear, the death scene he chose for his farewell.

Which Hollywood star helped finance Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus and took a small part in it?

Yul Brynner put money into the film as associate producer and appears in evening dress as the usher of the underworld, who keeps the poet waiting at the goddess's door.

Which director filmed Cocteau's novel Les Enfants Terribles in 1950, with the author as screenwriter and narrator?

Jean-Pierre Melville made this hothouse tale of a brother and sister with the novelist's voice on the soundtrack, then turned to the cool gangster films, such as Le Samouraï, that made his name.

Cocteau's screenplay for the 1943 film The Eternal Return moved which medieval love legend to modern France?

Tristan and Isolde became Patrice and Nathalie in modern dress; Cocteau wrote the script and picked the cast, but handed the directing to Jean Delannoy.

Whom did Cocteau formally adopt late in life?

Édouard Dermit, a young man from Lorraine first taken on as Cocteau's gardener, became his heir and painted the Fréjus chapel that the poet had designed but not lived to decorate.

Cocteau's semi-autobiographical homoerotic novel of 1928 was published how?

Anonymously: Le Livre blanc carried no author's name, though the secret was thin, for two years later Cocteau signed a preface to it and supplied his own unmistakable drawings.

Which novelist did Cocteau champion in the 1940s, helping to publish one of his books and illustrating another?

Jean Genet faced automatic life imprisonment after his tenth conviction for theft, until Cocteau, Sartre and other writers appealed to the French president on his behalf.

Cocteau's 1942 newspaper tribute to which German artist, an old friend, was held against him after the Liberation?

Arno Breker, the regime's star sculptor, opened a Paris exhibition in May 1942 and Cocteau saluted him in print days later; after the war the article brought a collaboration charge, of which he was cleared.

Cocteau dedicated his poems about flying to which pioneer pilot, a friend who had taken him up in his plane?

Roland Garros was killed in air combat weeks before the 1918 armistice; the Paris stadium that stages the French Open was later named after him.

For which singer did Cocteau write the 1940 play Le Bel Indifférent?

Édith Piaf does all the talking: the one-act play is a single monologue hurled at a lover, played on the first night by Paul Meurisse, who never answers a word.

Which chapel did Cocteau cover with murals in 1956 and 1957?

Chapelle Saint-Pierre, Villefranche-sur-Mer, belongs to the port's fishermen, which is why he filled it with the life of their patron, Saint Peter, among the nets and fish of the harbour.

Cocteau was elected to which body in 1955?

The Académie française elected him by 17 votes to 11, and in his speech he pictured its domed hall as an undersea grotto where forty green-tailed sirens sat in rows.

Of which film festival was Cocteau honorary president?

Cannes passed over his Beauty and the Beast at its first festival in 1946, then twice asked him to preside over its jury, in 1953 and 1954.

Where did Cocteau die of a heart attack in October 1963?

Milly-la-Forêt, a village south of Paris, had been his home since 1947; the famous tale that his heart gave out on hearing of a friend's death that morning is probably legend.

Cocteau covered a patron's Riviera house with drawings and called it what?

The tattooed villa: invited for a short holiday in 1950, he asked to draw one head of Apollo above a fireplace and did not stop until walls, doors and ceilings were covered.

What epitaph is set into the chapel floor above Cocteau's grave?

'I stay with you' is cut into the floor of a small chapel, the last remnant of a medieval lepers' hospital, whose walls he had covered with drawings of the healing herbs that give it its name.

Which schoolmate at the Lycée Condorcet reappeared throughout Cocteau's work?

Pierre Dargelos, the swaggering classmate who fascinated him, turns up under his own name in Les Enfants Terribles, hurling the stone-packed snowball that fells the hero.

Which fashion designer dressed the dancers of Cocteau's 1924 beach ballet Le Train bleu?

Coco Chanel put the swimmers and tennis players in real sportswear, since the ballet is set on a fashionable Riviera beach, and she went on to costume other Cocteau stage works.