Patrice Chéreau (; 2 November 1944 – 7 October 2013) was a French opera and theatre director, filmmaker, actor and producer. In France he is best known for his work for the theatre, internationally for his films La Reine Margot and Intimacy, and for his staging of the Jahrhundertring, the centenary Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in 1976. Winner of almost twenty movie awards, including the Cannes Jury Prize and the Golden Berlin Bear, Chéreau served as president of the jury at the 2003 Cannes festival.
From 1966, he was artistic director of the Public-Theatre in the Parisian suburb of Sartrouville, where in his team were stage designer Richard Peduzzi, costume designer Jacques Schmidt and lighting designer André Diot, with whom he collaborated in many later productions. From 1982, he was director of "his own stage" at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers at Nanterre where he staged plays by Jean Racine, Marivaux and Shakespeare as well as works by Jean Genet, Heiner Müller and Bernard-Marie Koltès.
He accepted selected opera productions, such as: the first performance of the three-act version of Alban Berg's Lulu, completed by Friedrich Cerha, at the Paris Opera in 1979; Berg's Wozzeck at the Staatsoper Berlin in 1994; Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at La Scala in 2007; Janáček's From the House of the Dead, shown at several festivals and the Metropolitan Opera; and, as his last staging, Elektra by Richard Strauss, first performed at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July 2013. He was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in 2008.
Life and career
Early life
Chéreau was born in Lézigné, Maine-et-Loire, on 2 November 1944. His father, Jean-Baptiste Chéreau, was a painter, and his mother, Marguerite Pelicier, was a graphic designer. He attended school in Paris. Early on he was taken to the Louvre and became interested in the arts, cinema, theatre and music. At age 12, he designed stage sets for plays. He became well known to Parisian critics as director, actor, and stage manager of his high-school theatre (lycée Louis-le-Grand). At 15, he was enthusiastically celebrated as a theatre prodigy. In 1964, at the age of 19, he began directing for the professional theatre. While studying at the Sorbonne, he professionally staged Victor Hugo's L'Intervention, and subsequently dropped out of the university.
1966: Sartrouville
In 1966, Chéreau was appointed artistic director of the Public-Theatre in the Parisian suburb of Sartrouville. With "idealism and inventiveness", he made the theatre a "municipal commodity", presenting not only theatre but also "cinema, concerts, poetry productions, lectures and debates about everything from politics to pot". His theatrical team included costume designer Jacques Schmidt, stage designer Richard Peduzzi and lighting designer André Diot, with all of whom he collaborated in many later productions.
In 1968, he directed The Soldiers by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz at the Festival of Youth Theatre in Nancy. In 1969, he staged his first opera production, Rossini's L'italiana in Algeri for the Spoleto Festival, again with his Sartrouville team. The following year he established a close artistic relationship with the leadership of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler. There, he staged Pablo Neruda's "revolutionary oratorio" The Splendour and Death of Joaquin Murieta. In 1970, he directed Shakespeare's Richard II at the Théâtre de France. His first staging for the Paris Opera was in 1974 Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann. He showed Hoffmann, sung by Nicolai Gedda, as a "sensitive poet for whom love is beyond reach, ... a drunken loser". In 1975, he worked in Germany for the first time directing Edward Bond's Lear, set in an "industrial landscape strewn with piles of slag, with Lear as a Baron Krupp in evening dress and top hat". He commented on the "macabre" production: "Just as some people feed on hope, I feed on despair. For me it is a spur to action." Also in 1975, his directorial debut film was the thriller La Chair de l'orchidée, based on James Hadley Chase's 1948 novel The Flesh of the Orchid, sequel to No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939). The film assembled a starry cast including Edwige Feuillère, Simone Signoret, Alida Valli and Charlotte Rampling "in the [Miss Blandish] role giving a performance of extraordinary intensity. It was an almost operatic version of the misunderstood 1948 British film."