Editing Jean Anouilh (section)

===Early life===
Anouilh was born in Cérisole, a small village on the outskirts of [[Bordeaux]], France and had [[Basque people|Basque]] ancestry. His father, François Anouilh, was a tailor, and Anouilh maintained that he inherited from him a pride in conscientious craftmanship. He may owe his artistic bent to his mother, Marie-Magdeleine, a violinist who supplemented the family's meager income by playing summer seasons in the casino orchestra in the nearby seaside resort of [[Arcachon]]. Marie-Magdeleine worked the night shifts in the music-hall orchestras and sometimes accompanied stage presentations, affording Anouilh ample opportunity to absorb the dramatic performances from backstage. He often attended rehearsals and solicited the resident authors to let him read scripts until bedtime. He first tried his hand at playwriting here, at the age of 12, though his earliest works do not survive.<ref name="Rocchi"/>

[[Image:lycée chaptal.jpeg|thumb|250px|left|The [[Lycée Chaptal]], at the corner of rue de Rome and the boulevard des Batignolles]]

In 1918 the family moved to Paris where the young Anouilh received his secondary education at the [[Lycée Chaptal]]. [[Jean-Louis Barrault]], later a major French director, was a pupil there at the same time and recalls Anouilh as an intense, rather dandified figure who hardly noticed a boy some two years younger than himself. He earned acceptance into the law school at the [[University of Paris|Sorbonne]] but, unable to support himself financially, he left after just 18 months to seek work as a copywriter at the advertising agency Publicité Damour. He liked the work, and spoke more than once with wry approval of the lessons in the classical virtues of brevity and precision of language he learned while drafting advertising copy.<ref name="Liukkonen"/>
[[File:GraveCatherineAndJeanAnouilhAndUrsulaWetzel-CimetiereDePully RomanDeckert15012023.jpg|thumb|The grave of Anouilh, his eldest daughter Catherine (1934–1989) and his last partner Ursula Wetzel (1938–2010) at the cemetery of [[Pully]] near Lausanne]]
Anouilh's financial troubles continued after he was called up to military service in 1929.  Supported by only his meager conscription salary, Anouilh married the actress Monelle Valentin in 1931. Though Valentin starred in many of his plays, Anouilh's daughter Caroline (from his second marriage), says the marriage was not a happy one. Anouilh's youngest daughter Colombe even says there was never an official marriage between Anouilh and Valentin. She allegedly had multiple extramarital affairs, which caused Anouilh much pain and suffering. The infidelity weighed heavily on the dramatist as a result of the uncertainty about his own parentage. According to Caroline, Anouilh had learned that his mother had had a lover at the theatre in Arcachon who was actually his biological father. In spite of this, Anouilh and Valentin had a daughter, Catherine, in 1934 who followed the pair into theatre work at an early age. Anouilh's growing family placed further strain on his already limited finances. Determined to break into writing full-time, he began to write comic scenes for the cinema to supplement their income.<ref name="AnouilhCaroline"/>