Marcel Achard

Marcel Achard, born Marcel-Auguste Ferréol, was a French playwright and screenwriter whose career spanned much of the twentieth century. Born in 1899 in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, a suburb of Lyon, and dying in Paris in 1974, he became known for sentimental comedies that kept him a recognisable figure in French theatrical and literary circles for roughly five decades. He was elected to the Académie française in 1959.

He adopted his pen name at the beginning of his writing career in the early 1920s. Before that he had worked as a village schoolteacher during the First World War. At twenty he moved to Paris, where he worked as a prompter at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier and as a journalist for several papers, among them Le Figaro. His breakthrough came in 1923 with Voulez-vous jouer avec moâ?, a play about a circus and its clowns, staged by Charles Dullin, which won him a following in the Paris theatre. Much of his later output followed a similar pattern: stock figures from the commedia dell'arte, such as Pierrot and Columbine, placed in modern settings and drawn into love stories where laughter and regret sit side by side.

His work was not confined to one register. Alongside popular comedies such as Jean de la Lune (1929) and Domino (1932), he wrote more unusual pieces, including La femme en blanc (1933), which had the characters narrate events that the audience then saw staged, and Le corsaire (1938), a play within a play. Adam (1938), about an unhappy gay man, was scandalous when first staged. His greatest success came between the wars. After 1945 critics often faulted him for a sentimental and narrow view of human feeling, though his plays remained popular on stage.

Achard also worked steadily in film. He adapted his own plays, took part in films in the 1930s and wrote screenplays for directors including Jean Renoir. He presided over the Cannes Film Festival in 1958 and 1959. His legacy lies mainly in twentieth-century French comedy, where his plays are still performed, and in his blend of humour, social observation and melancholy, which influenced later playwrights and screenwriters.