Jean Cocteau

Born July 1889, Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau spent the first half of the 20th century proving a single artist could work everywhere at once. Novels arrived first - Le Grand Écart in 1923, Le Livre blanc in 1928, Les Enfants Terribles in 1929 - then plays including La Voix Humaine in 1930 and La Machine Infernale four years later. By then he'd already made The Blood of a Poet, the 1930 film that opened what became his Orphic Trilogy, completed three decades later with Orpheus and Testament of Orpheus. In between came Beauty and the Beast in 1946 and a screen adaptation of his own Les Parents terribles two years after that. He called it all poetry - poésie cinématographique, poésie graphique, poésie de théâtre - a classification that mattered more to him than any label the avant-garde tried to pin on. He died in October 1963, having left a body of work unequalled for its variety of artistic expression.