Sacha Guitry

Alexandre-Pierre Georges "Sacha" Guitry (French: [gitʁi]; 21 February 1885 – 24 July 1957) was a French stage actor, film actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright of the boulevard theatre. He was the son of a leading French actor, Lucien Guitry, and followed his father into the theatrical profession. He became known for his stage performances, particularly in boulevardier roles. He was also a prolific playwright, writing 115 plays throughout his career. He was married five times, always to rising actresses whose careers he furthered. Probably his best-known wife was Yvonne Printemps to whom he was married between 1919 and 1932.

Guitry's plays range from historical dramas to contemporary light comedies. Some have incidental music by composers including André Messager and Reynaldo Hahn. When silent films became popular Guitry avoided them, finding the lack of spoken dialogue fatal to dramatic impact. From the 1930s to the end of his life he enthusiastically embraced the cinema, making as many as five films in a single year.

The later years of Guitry's career were overshadowed by accusations of collaborating with the occupying Germans after the capitulation of France in the Second World War. The charges were dismissed, but Guitry, a strongly patriotic man, was disillusioned by the vilification he received from some of his compatriots. By the time of his death, his popular esteem had been restored to the extent that 12,000 people filed past his coffin before his burial in Paris.

Guitry was born at No 12 Nevsky Prospect, Saint Petersburg, Russia, the third son of the French actors Lucien Guitry and his wife Marie-Louise-Renée née Delmas de Pont-Jest (1858–1902). The couple had eloped, in the face of family disapproval, and were married at St Martin in the Fields, London, in 1882. They then moved to the then Russian capital, where Lucien ran the French theatre company, the Théâtre Michel, from 1882 to 1891. The marriage was brief. Guitry senior was a persistent adulterer, and his wife instituted divorce proceedings in 1888. Two of their sons died in infancy (one in 1883 and the other in 1887); the other surviving son, Jean (1884–1920) became an actor and journalist. The family's Russian nurse habitually shortened Alexandre-Pierre's name to the Russian diminutive "Sacha", by which he was known all his life. The young Sacha made his stage debut in his father's company at the age of five.

Lucien Guitry, considered the most distinguished actor in France since Coquelin, was immensely successful, both critically and commercially. When he returned to Paris he lived in a flat in a prestigious spot, overlooking the Place Vendôme and the Rue de la Paix. The young Sacha lived there, and for his schooling he was first sent to the well-known Lycée Janson de Sailly in the fashionable Sixteenth arrondissement. He did not stay long there, and went to a succession of other schools, both secular and religious, before abandoning formal education at the age of sixteen.

After giving up school Guitry embarked on a career as a playwright with a little musical piece called Le Page, with a score by Ludo Ratz, premiered at the Théâtre des Mathurins on 15 April 1902. Eighteen months later he joined his father's company at the Théâtre de la Renaissance. At first he appeared under the stage name "Lorcey"; the pseudonym deceived no-one, as the press immediately announced the debutant's real identity. His first role was in L'Escalier, by Maurice Donnay in November 1904. He fell out with his father over what the latter saw as Guitry's lack of professionalism. In the aftermath of their quarrel they neither saw nor spoke to one another.

A member of Lucien Guitry's company was a young actress, Charlotte-Augustine-Hortense Lejeune, whose stage name was Charlotte Lysès (1877–1956). In April 1905, she and Sacha set up home together in the rue d'Anjou (now the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré). For her he wrote his play, Le KWTZ, premiered in December 1905 at the Théâtre des Capucins. In the same month he had his first substantial hit with Nono at the Mathurins. When the leading man in Guitry's 1906 play Chez les Zoaques fell ill the author took over, and in the words of a critic, "proved to be his own definitive interpreter". The pattern of his career was set: he remained an actor-author, and later manager, for the rest of his life.

For the next five years, Guitry's plays were, at best, moderate successes, but he then had five consecutive hits with Le Veilleur de nuit (1911), Un Beau mariage (1912), Le Prise de Berg-op-Zoom (1912), La Pèlerine écossaise (1912), and Les Deux converts (1914), the last of which was staged by the Comédie-Française.