Lucien Guitry

Lucien Guitry

Lucien Germain Guitry (13 December 1860 – 1 June 1925) was a French actor.

Guitry was born in Paris.

In 1885 he was appearing in Saint Petersburg, where he lived for a few years, at the French Theatre (or Mikhaylovsky Theatre. His son, the future actor, writer and director Sacha Guitry was born in Saint Petersburg and named in honour of Tsar Alexander III. Lucien met the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and his brother Modest, and became good friends with them.^[1] It was at Guitry's instigation that Tchaikovsky wrote both his Hamlet Overture-Fantasy (Op. 67a) in 1888 and the Incidental Music to the Shakespeare play (Op. 67b) in 1891, for which he reused the overture-fantasy in shortened form as the overture.

He became prominent on the French stage at the Porte Saint-Martin theatre in 1900, and the Variétés in 1901, and then became a member of the Comédie Française, but he resigned very soon in order to become director of the Renaissance, where he was principally associated with the actress Marthe Brandès, who had also left the Comédie. Here he established his reputation, in a number of plays, as the greatest contemporary French actor in the drama of modern reality.

Filmography

• Ceux de chez nous (1915)

References

•  "Guitry, Lucien Germain". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. 

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