I recently had the honor and pleasure of being a guest on David A. Heath’s Cinema Chat podcast. David graciously allowed me to choose the topic. For years I have been fascinated by the career of French actor and writer Sacha Guitry, however what impressed me most was Guitry’s humanitarian spirit. Among my collection of scripts is a complete set of Guitry’s plays, which I plan to have translated from French into English. I invite you to read on and learn more about this talented and charismatic man of stage and screen.
Sacha Guitry was a man of all performing arts who fluidly transitioned from playwright to screen writer, actor, poet, novelist, sculptor, and artist. Above all, he was a master storyteller of the early twentieth century. Sacha was born in Russia in 1885 when his French performer parents were on tour. His father was renowned actor Lucien Guitry. Lucien attributed his extraordinary memory enabling his to remember lines to recovering from typhoid at the age of nine. Lucien was so famous his portrait was painted by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edouard Vuillard. He was raised to appreciate theater. At a time when girls were forbidden from sitting in the pit, Lucien’s father dressed his sisters as boys so they too could attend. Sacha’s Aunt Valentine later became an accomplished pianist who won a first prize at the Paris Conservatoire in 1867.
The Guitrys had a remarkable family history: the first known Seigneur Guitry had a church constructed in 1020 and owned a chateau. Guy de Chaumont, marquis de Guitry, was Grand Master of the Wardrobe to Louis XIV and a councilor of the state. When Sacha was just five years old his father brought him along to dine with the Tsar Alexander III of Russia. His parents soon after divorced. His father kidnapped Sacha: for that brief period Sacha had an escapade which left him feeling loved and adored. As a result of the divorce Sacha had no sense of family except for holidays spent with his father’s friend and colleague, Sarah Bernhardt, whom he regarded as a “second mother.”
Guitry “wrote and produced over 120 plays,” penning his first play when he was just sixteen years old.” He achieved fame in his own right at the age of twenty. One of his most successful plays was Debureau, based on the life of the comic-actor. Incidental music was composed by Andre Messager. Sacha’s father had had reservations about Sacha following him on to the stage which caused a rift between father and son which lasted over a dozen years. After Lucien attended a performance of Debureau he went backstage. Lucien and Sacha reconciled. To please his father, Sacha wrote a play about the life of Mozart, playing fast and loose with facts and chronology. Original music for this play was composed by Reynaldo Hahn, who had been Sarah Bernhardt’s music advisor.
He successfully made the transition from stage to film in the age of talkies. “He wrote and directed 32 films. Three are French classics.” When asked about his philosophy for success Guitry replied, “Don’t spend time with boring people.” Indeed, he hadn’t. His first film was Ceux de chez nous (1914–15), a silent film which consisted of clips of luminaries of the day including Guitry, Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, Saint-Saëns, Auguste Renoir, Lucien Guitry, and Claude Monet. His next film was Pasteur made in 1935 and based upon his play of the same title. Guitry filmed many of his plays. For this reason, many of his earlier films have the appearance of being set on a stage rather than using expansive locations. For Guitry, dialogue was the most important element of his films. Le Roman d’un tricheur (My Life as a Cheat) is one of his most highly regarded films. The story stands in sharp contrast to American films of the day in which honesty prevailed. In Roman, the son of a village shopkeeper is punished by being denied the treat of eating delicious mushrooms. The rest of the family consumes them only to discover too late that the mushrooms are poisonous and they die. The boy decides that he was saved from an untimely death by being dishonest.
According to his biographer, James Harding, Guitry was “the complete hedonist.” Guitry married five times and had no children: his current wife was his co-star on stage or screen. Guitry’s first wife was actress Charlotte Lysés. His second wife, Yvonne Printemp, was perhaps Guitry’s closest theatrical partner. She starred in his operetta, Mariette, with music composed by Oskar Straus. Husband and wife played dual roles. Guitry was intensely jealous of the attention paid to Yvonne by other men. Ever under Guitry’s watchful eye, Yvonne regarded her marriage as living in a gilded cage. As Harding relates, “he gave her millions of francs’ worth of jewelry but never paid her a fee” for her stage appearances. They divorced as he approached his fiftieth birthday. His subsequent wives were Jacqueline Delubac, Geneviève de Séréville, and Lana Marconi. While courting de Séréville Guitry had delivered to her a new wardrobe and “all the trinkets that go with it.” He once proposed to Arletty, but she refused his offer.
Guitry presented his own version of history in his plays, films, and novels. He was not concerned with the facts, only with telling a good story. He was also a pioneer in filmmaking. Les Perles de la couronne (Pearls of the Crown), (1937) was an experimental trilingual film with dialogue in English, French, and Italian. His film Désiré was a comic look at class differences between the wealthy and those who served them through the eyes of the butler. Guitry’s dialogue was spot on. After seeing the play his own butler commented that, “monsieur listens at key-holes.” Inspiration for his period pieces often struck while at home, an estate he filled with historical treasures and oddities, and fine art by Modigliani, Van Gogh, Utrillo and Degas sketches.
Guitry’s career stalled during World War II. He was accused of collaborating with the Nazis by the French government and put in prison for sixty days when, in fact, Guitry was helping Jews escape occupied territory and had to be silenced. He felt a moral obligation to help where and who he could. An unnamed German army official attended Guitry’s stage revival of Pasteur, a play about the famed scientist: Guitry took the opportunity to “ask for the release of ten French prisoners. The request was granted.” When the news of the prisoners’ release spread, Guitry was “inundated with requests from desperate relatives” to make similar requests on behalf of their family members.
The banishment of Jewish culture in France by the Nazis hit home when the name of Sarah Bernhardt’s theater was changed to Théâtre de la Cité because she “had Jewish blood.” In protest, Guitry staged public showings of his film Ceux de chez nous, which was illegal because it featured Bernhardt. As a result, Guitry was forced to show the birth records of his family dating back to his great grandmother’s generation to prove his ancestry. To assist his friends and their loved ones, Guitry procured the release of playwright Tristan Bernard, then seventy-seven years old, and his wife. Others who were released or escaped the Occupied Zone through Guitry’s intervention included poet and philosopher “Paul Valéry,” who had garnered 12 nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature, actress “Collette’s husband, Madame Courteline, the widow of Marshal Joffre, the producer Antoine, poet Max Jacob, members of the Clemenceau family, Madame Matisse,” and many others seeking help. For his support of friends and colleagues, Guitry was arrested for collaboration by the French government and spent sixty days in prison. Although the charges were cleared, his public image was ruined. It took over a decade for Guitry to regain his status as a film star.
Two of Guitry’s latest and largest scale films were Si Versailles m’était conté (1953) and Napoléon (1954) with casts of thousands. Versailles was filmed on location and the “profits of the film went toward the reconstruction” of the palace. Guitry’s final film was Si Paris nous était conté which was even larger, with a “cast of five thousand.” By then, Guitry was experiencing serious health problems. Wracked with pain, he had to be carried to the film set on a stretcher. His close friend, critic and animal advocate Paul Léautaud passed away and so did his first wife, Charlotte, who had launched his acting career. The deaths of two people who had meant so much to him was a crushing blow. Film directing kept him going for a time. Morphine injections numbed his sensitivity to the pain. When Guitry was no longer ambulatory, the paintings he painstakingly collected were brought into his bedroom for him to view.
When the end came, Sacha was buried in the same grave as his father at Montmarte Cemetery. Twelve thousand mourners came to pay their respects to one of the great figures of French film and theater. Guitry had no heir to take over his estate. The executors sold his art and antiques collection to pay debts. A real estate company bought the property and bulldozed the house which could have served as a museum. Guitry lives on in the annals of film history waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation of film historians.
Cinema Chat:
Harding, James. Sacha Guitry: The Last Boulevardier, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York: 1968.
photo credit: Parismatch.com
