Jean Cocteau Trivia
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48 free Jean Cocteau trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Jean Cocteau trivia quiz covers a man who refused to be one thing. Poet, playwright, novelist, draughtsman, designer and filmmaker, he insisted on calling all of it poetry, and the quiz follows him through every form. It starts with the essentials: where he was born, what he called himself, the ballet he wrote for Diaghilev with Picasso's sets and Satie's score, the six composers he championed, and the bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Then it moves through the friendship with the doomed young novelist Raymond Radiguet, the opium years, the novel written in a week during withdrawal, and the plays that made his name in the 1930s. The second half is the cinema and the private life. The Blood of a Poet financed by a viscount, the human-armed candelabra of Beauty and the Beast, the mirror and the Rolls-Royce of Orpheus, the last film with Picasso and Yul Brynner, and the actor Jean Marais who was both muse and star. It closes with the wartime controversy, the Académie française, the chapel he decorated, the death that came a day after Édith Piaf's, and the three words on his gravestone. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Cocteau and his major works and collaborators, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the 1930s Cocteau coaxed a faded former world champion back to the top of which sport?
Boxing
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.
Q 02Which nickname of the young Cocteau in bohemian Paris was also the title of his second book of poems?
The Frivolous Prince
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.
Q 03What did Cocteau do during the First World War?
Drove an ambulance
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.
Q 04Which impresario persuaded Cocteau to write the scenario for the ballet Parade?
Sergei Diaghilev
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.
Q 05Who designed the sets and costumes for Cocteau's ballet Parade in 1917?
Pablo Picasso
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.
Q 06Which poet coined the word 'surrealism' in his programme note for Cocteau's ballet Parade?
Guillaume Apollinaire
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.
Q 07Which group of composers did Cocteau champion in the 1920s?
Les Six
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.
Q 08Which member of the group Cocteau championed was Swiss rather than French?
Arthur Honegger
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.
Q 09Which fashionable 1920s Paris bar took its name from a ballet-farce that Cocteau had staged?
Le Boeuf sur le Toit
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.
Q 10Cocteau's play The Eagle with Two Heads, about a queen and her would-be assassin, drew on which murdered empress?
Elisabeth of Austria
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.
Q 11What was the title of Radiguet's autobiographical novel of adultery that Cocteau got published?
Le Diable au corps
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.
Q 12What killed Cocteau's young protégé Raymond Radiguet in December 1923?
Typhoid fever
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.
Q 13In which foreign capital did Cocteau paint the murals of a French church's chapel in little more than a week?
London
Q 21Which viscount gave Cocteau a million francs to make The Blood of a Poet?
Charles de Noailles
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.
Q 22Which American photographer plays the statue that comes to life in Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet?
Lee Miller
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.
Q 23Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy is made up of Orpheus, Testament of Orpheus and which earlier film?
The Blood of a Poet
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.
Q 14To which drug did Cocteau become addicted in the 1920s?
Opium
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.
Q 15In Cocteau's film Orpheus, the elegant Princess who arrives in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce turns out to be who?
Death
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.
Q 16Which Catholic philosopher visited Cocteau during a drug cure and drew him back to the Church for a time?
Jacques Maritain
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.
Q 17For which composer did Cocteau write the text of a 1927 opera-oratorio that was then translated into Latin?
Igor Stravinsky
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.
Q 18Cocteau's 1934 play La Machine infernale retells which legend?
Oedipus
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.
Q 19Cocteau's play La Voix humaine became a 1958 opera by which composer?
Francis Poulenc
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.
Q 20In 1936 Cocteau set off on which journey for the newspaper Paris-Soir?
Around the world in 80 days
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.
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.
Q 24Who played the Beast in Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast?
Jean Marais
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.
Q 25In Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, what guides Belle's father through the castle?
An enchanted candelabra
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.
Q 26In Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, what rises from the Beast's hands after he has killed?
Smoke
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.
Q 27Which composer turned Cocteau's film Beauty and the Beast into an opera in 1994?
Philip Glass
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.
Q 28In Cocteau's Orpheus, how do characters cross from the world of the living into the underworld?
Through a mirror
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.
Q 29In Cocteau's Orpheus, cryptic verse reaches the poet through what?
A car radio
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.
Q 30In Cocteau's film Orpheus, where does the hero first cross paths with the Princess, minutes before a fatal brawl?
The Café des Poètes
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.