Sacha Guitry

Alexandre-Pierre Georges Guitry, known throughout his life by the Russian diminutive "Sacha," was born on 21 February 1885 at No. 12 Nevsky Prospect in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the third son of the French actors Lucien Guitry and Marie-Louise-Renée née Delmas de Pont-Jest. His father had moved the family to the Russian capital to run the French theatrical company the Théâtre Michel, a post he held from 1882 to 1891. The nickname Sacha was given to him by the family's Russian nurse and stayed with him for the rest of his life. His parents' marriage ended in divorce in 1888, and two of his brothers died in infancy; his surviving brother Jean, born in 1884, went on to become an actor and journalist.

Guitry made his stage debut at the age of five in his father's company. After abandoning formal education at sixteen, he launched his career as a playwright with a short musical piece, Le Page, which premiered at the Théâtre des Mathurins on 15 April 1902. He joined his father's company at the Théâtre de la Renaissance eighteen months later, initially performing under the pseudonym "Lorcey," though the press quickly identified him. His first role was in Maurice Donnay's L'Escalier in November 1904. A quarrel with his father over professionalism led to a prolonged estrangement between the two men. During this period, Guitry began a relationship with actress Charlotte Lysès, for whom he wrote the play Le KWTZ, premiered in December 1905, and scored his first substantial hit the same month with Nono at the Mathurins. When the leading man in his 1906 play Chez les Zoaques fell ill, Guitry stepped into the role himself, establishing the pattern of actor-author-manager that defined the rest of his career.

Over the following years Guitry built his reputation steadily, achieving five consecutive stage successes between 1911 and 1914: Le Veilleur de nuit, Un Beau mariage, La Prise de Berg-op-Zoom, La Pèlerine écossaise, and Les Deux converts, the last of which was staged by the Comédie-Française. In 1915 he made his first film, Ceux de chez nous, a short patriotic work featuring Sarah Bernhardt, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Edmond Rostand, Anatole France, and Camille Saint-Saëns. That same year he met the young singer Yvonne Printemps, with whom he began an affair that led to his separation and eventual divorce from Charlotte Lysès.

Guitry reconciled with his father in 1918, and the two subsequently appeared together in numerous productions alongside Printemps, including Mon Père avait raison and Comment on ecrit l'histoire. All three performed at the Aldwych Theatre in London during a four-week season in 1920. Guitry married Printemps in 1919, a union that lasted until 1932. Among the productions he created for her was the 1925 stage piece Mozart, a pastiche depicting the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on a visit to Paris. The score was composed by Reynaldo Hahn, who took the commission after André Messager, Guitry's earlier collaborator on L'amour masqué in 1923, was unavailable. In the production, Printemps played the young Mozart in a breeches role while Guitry portrayed the composer's patron, Baron Grimm. After a successful run at the Théâtre Edouard VII and a three-week London season in June and July 1926, Guitry and Printemps brought Mozart to Broadway, Boston, and Montreal in late 1926 and early 1927, returning to the United States and Canada again in 1929.

His Broadway work extended beyond Mozart. His credits include the play The Comedian, the play Pasteur, the play The Grand Duke, and Don't Listen, Ladies, for which he also served as book writer. These productions established his presence on the American stage as both a performer and a dramatist.

Throughout his career Guitry wrote 115 plays, ranging from historical dramas to light contemporary comedies, with incidental music by composers including André Messager and Reynaldo Hahn. He was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1931 and in 1932 marked thirty years on the stage with a celebratory banquet. Following the breakdown of his marriage to Printemps later that year, he returned to the theatre in April 1933 in Châteaux en Espagne, which co-starred Jacqueline Delubac, whom he married on his fiftieth birthday. During the 1930s he also turned his attention to cinema as writer, director, and star, making as many as five films in a single year, including the year 1936, in which he also wrote five plays, among them his hundredth, Le Mot de Cambronne. He had been married five times in total, always to actresses whose careers he advanced. He had avoided silent film, regarding spoken dialogue as essential to dramatic impact, and did not make a full-length film until 1935.

The final phase of Guitry's life was complicated by accusations that he had collaborated with the German occupiers of France during the Second World War. The charges were ultimately dismissed, but the experience left him disillusioned. By the time of his death on 24 July 1957, his public standing had been substantially restored; 12,000 people filed past his coffin before his burial in Paris.