December 11, 1913– Jean Marais was the muse & lover of artist/writer/filmmaker Jean Cocteau, & he was an actor of considerable skill & certain charisma. I used to swoon seeing his work in film class.
Marais was born Jean-Alfred Villain-Marais in Cherbourg to a shoplifting, sometimes violent, sometimes loving mother. He was always drawn to drama of all kinds. He was kicked out of school when, to amuse his friends, he dressed as a girl & flirted with a male teacher. Marais worked at various jobs, including newspaper boy, photographer, & sketch artist.
An early interest in painting, which would become his lifelong avocation, led to Marais’s first opportunity in films when he was 20 years old. After purchasing one of his paintings in 1933, director Marcel L’Herbier offered Marais small roles in several of his films.
When he was 24 year old, Marais first met the 48 year old Cocteau in 1937, when Marais auditioned for a role in a revival of Cocteau’s play Oedipe-Roi. Besides giving Marais the part, Cocteau fell instantly in love with the young actor.
Marais & Cocteau became partners in life & art. At Marais’s suggestion, Cocteau wrote a screenplay designed as a vehicle for the ambitious actor, L’eternel Retour in 1943. The film was a commercial success & a critical triumph for both the filmmaker & its star.
Marais continued to perform in films & plays while German troops occupied France during WW II. Both Cocteau & Marais stayed in Paris during the Nazi occupation in spite of the especially great danger of having nearly everyone know that they were a gay couple. Cocteau had some powerful connections who protected the couple, even after Marais punched a collaborationist critic for writing a bad review of one of Cocteau’s plays. Their names were posted in the French press, controlled by those damn Nazis but because Cocteau’s friends in high places, they avoided arrested & the concentration camps. Marais tried to join the Resistance, but he was rejected for being gay & his reputation for speaking candidly. Instead, he joined France’s Second Armored Division after the liberation of Paris & drove trucks carrying fuel & ammunition to the frontlines during the Allied invasion of Germany. Marais was eventually awarded the Croix de Guerre for his brave wartime service.
During the Nazi occupation, there were other gay couples in Paris, but it was unusual for anyone openly living together, working together, & behaving like a married couple.
After the war in 1946, L’eternel Retour, directed & written by Cocteau, introduced Marais to an American film audience. Photographs of his handsome face with his hot body became pin-up for teenage girls, & for gay fans aware of his unpublicized relationship with Cocteau.
Marais went on to make more films with Cocteau, & also starred in films by René Clément, Marc Allégret, Jean Renoir, Luchino Visconti, & Claude Lelouch.
Although the romantic relationship between Marais & Cocteau cooled down by the late 1940s, the couple remained the closest of friends until Cocteau’s final credits rolled for good in 1963. On his passing, Marais stated:
“I bitterly regret not having spent all of my life serving Cocteau instead of worrying about my own career.”
His acting career petered out in the 1970s & Marais retired to the French Riviera. He went back to painting & wrote several volumes of memoirs. Unless my memory is addled by old age & chemotherapy, the still handsome Marais briefly had a cabaret act with noted painter Stephen O’Donnell in late 1980s LA.
Marais appeared in his final screen role in 1996, in a film that I like a great deal, Bernardo Bertolucci’s beguiling Stealing Beauty. That same year, he was awarded the Legion Of Honor for his contribution to French Cinema.
Marais enjoyed a career lasting more than 6 decades. His blond, classical good-looks & skillful acting can be experienced in more than 70 films & television shows. On stage, Marais achieved great success in classical roles at Théâtre de Paris, Théâtre de l’Atelie, & The Comédie Francaise. On screen, he established himself as a versatile, romantic leading man in poetic dramas, light comedies, crime melodramas & swashbuckling adventure stories.
In the 1950s, Marais fell in love with the brilliant American dancer/choreographer George Reich. They were a couple for a decade. He sought to reconcile with Cocteau at the end of the great man’s life & frustrated, he relapsed into his old opium habit with Cocteau.
Marais had been legally adopted by Cocteau so that he would be his inheritor. Like Cocteau, Marais made the company of a handsome younger man, Serge Ayala, serving as his mentor, finding him acting work & adopting him as a son. He enjoyed his life with his protégé until he took his final curtain call in 1998, gone from heart failure, just like his former, fabulous, famous lover. In 2012, Serge Marias committed suicide.
Marais published 2 volumes of memoirs & a biography of Cocteau, ‘L’Inconcevable Jean Cocteau. In his last decade he lived & worked as a painter & sculptor at his home in Cannes. He claimed that life had been unfairly good to him:
”I always wanted to be happy. Perhaps that’s what pleased Cocteau, who was so anguished. I have never known stress. I was a sort of beast, a peasant type. I had no culture. I had never heard of Cocteau. I was given an unbelievable chance.”
