Jean Cocteau

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau ( , ; ; 5 July 1889 11 October 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost avant-garde artists of the 20th-century and hugely influential on the surrealist and Dadaist movements, among others. The ''National Observer'' suggested that "of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man".

He is best known for his novels (1923), (1928), and (1929); the stage plays (1930), (1934), (1938), (1941), and (1946); and the films ''The Blood of a Poet'' (1930), (1948), ''Beauty and the Beast'' (1946), ''Orpheus'' (1950), and ''Testament of Orpheus'' (1960), which alongside ''Blood of a Poet'' and ''Orpheus'' constitute the so-called Orphic Trilogy. He was described as "one of [the] avant-garde's most successful and influential filmmakers" by AllMovie. Cocteau, according to Annette Insdorf, "left behind a body of work unequalled for its variety of artistic expression".

Though his body of work encompassed many different mediums, Cocteau insisted on calling himself a poet, classifying the great variety of his works poems, novels, plays, essays, drawings, films as , , , , and . Provided by Wikipedia