1889–1963 · French poet, playwright, novelist & filmmaker
Jean Cocteau was one of the twentieth century’s great cultural omnivores — poet, novelist, playwright, designer and film director, author of Les Enfants Terribles (1929) and of the films Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orpheus (1950). He befriended Yul Brynner when Brynner was an unknown actor in Paris and opened the doors that made his career; Brynner later appeared in, and helped finance, Cocteau’s final film The Testament of Orpheus (1960). The aphorism reached print only through Brynner’s account of it in a 1956 interview — it has never been located in Cocteau’s own writings, so even this credit is a report rather than a citation.