Life and work
Despite his accomplishment inside most literary & artistic fields, Cocteau insisted that he was primarily the poet & that wholly his function was poetry. As a leading member of the Surrealist movement, he had dandy influence on a act of others, including the class action of composer friends within Montparnasse known as Les Six. Still, despite a fact that a word Surrealism was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe Cocteau's 1917 collaboration with Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso, and Léonide Massine Parade, self-proclaimed Surrealism leader André Breton declared Cocteau a "notorious false poet, a versifier who happens to debase rather than to elevate everything he touches." (Breton, 1953)\

On the sunny afternoon of August 12, 1916, Pablo Picasso and his new girlfriend, a fashion model Paquerette, Max Jacob, Manuel Ortiz de Zarate, Marie Vassilieff, Henri-Pierre Roché, Moise Kisling, Amedeo Modigliani and the critic André Salmon were sitting together outside the café La Rotonde inside Montparnasse. Their friend, Cocteau, recorded for posterity this extraordinary gathering of talent inside the series of Xxi exposure showing such characters as a rakish Picasso dressed ''à fifty'anglaise'' by using the flat cap, cane & briar pipe. Paquerette bore an extended elegant dress & a super silly hat, when Max Jacob at least browsed when though he was sober & respectable, & a midget Marie Vassilieff appeared the formidable little lady she was.

Inside 1918 he met the 15 season old poet Raymond Radiguet, with whome he experienced an acute & typically tempestuous relationship until a latter's premature demise piece on the hike together. View Historical pederastic relationships

In the Thirties, Cocteau experienced an unconvincing affair by using Princess Nathalie Paley, the beautiful girl of the Romanov gr& duke and herself the fashion-shell, quondam actress, model, and previous married woman of fashion designer Lucien Lelong. She became pregnant. To Cocteau's distress & Paley's womb-to-tomb sorrow, a foetus was aborted due to the intervention of Marie-Laure de Noailles, the nonconcentric arts patron world health organization experienced loved Cocteau as a miss & was determined to ruin his freshly romance. Cocteau's yearn lasting relationship was by using a handsome French actor Jean Marais, whom he discovered & cast inside Beauty & a Animal.

Inside 1940 Le Bel Indifférent, Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf, was enormously successful. He besides worked by owning Picasso on several projects & was friends using virtually all of the European art community. He struggled by having opium addiction for most of his grownup life & was openly gay, though he had two or three brief & complicated affairs sustaining women. He published the considerable total of act criticising homophobia.

Cocteau's films, a bulk of which he two wrote & directed, were particularly significant within introducing Surrealism into French cinemthe & influenced to a certain degree the approaching French Just released Wave genre.

Cocteau is better known for his 1929 novel Les enfants terribles, the 1929 play Les parents terribles, and a 1945 film, Beauty and the Beast.

Inside 1955 he was made the member of the Académie française and The Royal Academy of Belgium.

In the period of his life Cocteau was commander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Mallarmé Academy, German Academy (Berlin), American Academy, Mark Twain (U.S.The) Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes film festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association & President of the jazz Academy and of the Academy of the Disc.

Cocteau died within 1963 at the age of 74 & is buried around Chapelle St. Blaise Des Simples, Milly La Foret, Essonne, France.

Filmography, as director
''Le testament d'Orphée (1960) La villa Santo-Sospir (1952) Coriolan (1950) Orphée (1949) Les parents terribles (1948) L'aigle à deux têtes (1947) La belle et la bête (1946) Le sang d'un poète (1930) Jean Cocteau fait du cinéma (1925)

Books by Jean Cocteau
Selected works: Cocteau, Jean, A Art of Cinema, edited by André Bernard & Claude Gauteur, translated by Robin Buss, Marion Boyars, London, 1988 Cocteau, Jean, Diary of an Unknown, translated by Jesse Browner, Paragon Home Publishers, Future York, 1988 Cocteau, Jean, A Eagle Has 2 Heads, adapted by Ronald Duncan, Vision Click Ltd., Swell Britain, 1947 Cocteau, Jean, A Holy Terrors (Les enfants terribles), translated by Rosamond Lehmann, Up to date Directions Publishing Corp., Up to date York, 1957 Cocteau, Jean, A Man Voice, translated by Carl Wildman, Vision Click Ltd., Wonderful Britain, 1947 Cocteau, Jean, A Infernal Machine & More Plays, translated by W.The. Auden, E.E. Cummings, Dudley Fitts, Albert Bermel, Mary C. Hoeck, & John K. Savacool, Fresh Directions Books, Up to date York, 1963 Cocteau, Jean, Les parents terribles, freshly translation by Jeremy Sams, Nick Hern Books, London, 1994 Cocteau, Jean, A White Book (Le livre blanc), translated by Margaret Crosland, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1989 Cocteau, Jean, Le coq et l'arlequin: Notes autour de la musique - avec un portrait de l'Auteur et deux monogrammes par P. Picasso'', Paris, Éditions delaware la Sirène, 1918