Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh, a French dramatist, was born on June 23, 1910, in Cérisole, a small village near Bordeaux, and had Basque ancestry.
His father, François Anouilh, was a tailor who instilled in him a pride in conscientious craftsmanship, a trait that Anouilh maintained he inherited from him.
Anouilh's mother, Marie-Magdeleine, was a violinist who worked at night to supplement the family's income, playing in the casino orchestra in the nearby seaside resort of Arcachon. She would often accompany stage presentations, allowing Anouilh to absorb dramatic performances from backstage.
As a child, Anouilh would attend rehearsals and ask the resident authors to let him read scripts until bedtime. He began writing plays at the age of 12, although his earliest works do not survive.
In 1918, the family moved to Paris, where Anouilh received his secondary education at the Lycée Chaptal. It was here that he met Jean-Louis Barrault, a future major French director, who recalled Anouilh as an intense, dandified figure who hardly noticed a boy two years younger than himself.
After earning acceptance into the law school at the Sorbonne, Anouilh left after just 18 months to seek work as a copywriter at the advertising agency Publicité Damour. He enjoyed the work and appreciated the lessons in brevity and precision of language he learned while drafting advertising copy.
Anouilh's work as a dramatist spanned five decades, ranging from high drama to absurdist farce. He is best known for his 1944 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' classical drama, which was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's Vichy government.
