Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

Birth : 1960-03-28, Lyon, Rhône, France

History

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt (born 28 March 1960) is a Franco–Belgian playwright, short story writer and novelist, as well as a film director. His plays have been staged in over fifty countries all over the world. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's parents were teachers of physical education and sport, and his father later became a physiotherapist and masseur in paediatric hospitals. He was also a French boxing champion while his mother was a medal-winning runner. His grandfather was an artisan jeweller. The "Classiques & Contemporains" edition of La Nuit de Valognes (Don Juan on Trial) claims that Schmitt depicts himself as a rebellious teenager who detested received wisdom and was sometimes prone to violent outbursts. According to Schmitt, however, it was philosophy that saved him and taught him to be himself and to feel that he was free. One day, his mother took him to the Théâtre des Célestins to see a performance of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac starring Jean Marais. Her son was moved to tears and the seeds of his passion for the theatre were sown. After the show, he told his mother that he wanted to "be like the man on the poster"; his mother thought he meant the actor, Jean Marais, but he replied: "No!" and read out the name on the poster "Edmond Rostand". He then began to write. Later, he would say: "At sixteen, I realised (or decided) that I was a writer, and I wrote, produced and acted in my first plays at high school." To improve his style, he threw himself with frenzied zeal into exercises of pastiche and re-writing, especially Molière. After preparatory classes at the Lycée du Parc for France's elite universities, Schmitt passed the entrance exam to the École normale supérieure. He was a student there between 1980 and 1985, leaving with the top French teaching qualification in philosophy (agrégé de philosophie). In 1987, he was awarded the degree of PhD for his thesis "Diderot and Metaphysics" at the Paris-Sorbonne University, which was published in 1997 with the title "Diderot or the Philosophy of Seduction". He has lived in Brussels since 2002 and obtained Belgian citizenship in 2008. Schmitt spent his military service teaching at the Saint-Cyr Military Academy, afterwards spending two years as a student teaching assistant at the University of Besançon. He went on to teach at the high school in Cherbourg before being appointed lecturer at the University of Chambéry, where he taught for four years. On the night of 4 February 1989, he became separated from his companions during an expedition to the Ahaggar Desert and, in the vast expanses of the Sahara, he underwent a spiritual experience that was nothing short of a divine revelation. In that instant, he says that his mind was filled with the words "Everything is justified". Schmitt believes that it was that extraordinary experience that enabled him to break into writing. He describes it in his novel Night of Fire (La Nuit de Feu), published in September 2015. ... Source: Article "Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Profile

Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

Movies

Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran
Piccoli crimini coniugali
Novel
Gilles is suffering from amnesia as the result of a mysterious accident.
La Dernière Campagne
Patrick Buisson
Oscar and the Lady in Pink
Writer
Listening in to a conversation between his doctor and parents, 10-year-old Oscar learns what nobody has the courage to tell him. He only has a few weeks to live. Furious, he refuses to speak to anyone except straight-talking Rose, the lady in pink he meets on the hospital stairs. As Christmas approaches, Rose uses her fantastical experiences as a professional wrestler, her imagination, wit and charm to allow Oscar to live life and love to the full, in the company of his friends Pop Corn, Einstein, Bacon and childhood sweetheart Peggy Blue. Written by American Film Market
Oscar and the Lady in Pink
Director
Listening in to a conversation between his doctor and parents, 10-year-old Oscar learns what nobody has the courage to tell him. He only has a few weeks to live. Furious, he refuses to speak to anyone except straight-talking Rose, the lady in pink he meets on the hospital stairs. As Christmas approaches, Rose uses her fantastical experiences as a professional wrestler, her imagination, wit and charm to allow Oscar to live life and love to the full, in the company of his friends Pop Corn, Einstein, Bacon and childhood sweetheart Peggy Blue. Written by American Film Market
Oscar et la dame Rose
Author
Odette Toulemonde
Screenplay
Objectively, Odette Toulemonde has nothing to be happy about, but is. Balthazar Balsan has everything to be happy about, but isn’t. Odette, awkwardly forty, with a delightful hairdresser son and a daughter bogged down in adolescence, spends her days behind the cosmetic’s counter in a department store and her nights sewing feathers on costumes for Parisian variety shows. She dreams of thanking Balthazar Balsan, her favorite author, to whom – she believes – she owes her optimism. The rich and charming Parisian writer then turns up in her life in an unexpected way.
Odette Toulemonde
Director
Objectively, Odette Toulemonde has nothing to be happy about, but is. Balthazar Balsan has everything to be happy about, but isn’t. Odette, awkwardly forty, with a delightful hairdresser son and a daughter bogged down in adolescence, spends her days behind the cosmetic’s counter in a department store and her nights sewing feathers on costumes for Parisian variety shows. She dreams of thanking Balthazar Balsan, her favorite author, to whom – she believes – she owes her optimism. The rich and charming Parisian writer then turns up in her life in an unexpected way.
L’Évangile selon Pilate
Author
Volpone
Screenplay
A version of Ben Johnson's play: A Venetian swindler goes from town to town pretending to be a dying millionaire in order to attract (and dispose of) greedy "friends".
Milady
Screenplay
Milady De Winter, a beautiful femme fatale without scruples, plays with the feelings of her suitors. And sometimes very dangerously.
Monsieur Ibrahim
Novel
Paris, 1960s. Momo, a resolute and independent Jewish teenager who lives with his father, a sullen and depressed man, in a working-class neighborhood, develops a close friendship with Monsieur Ibrahim, an elderly Muslim who owns a small grocery store.
Aurélien
Screenplay
France, 1920s: An affluent ladies' man finds himself in love with a homely married woman.
Sarah
Scenario Writer
A stage play by John Murrell, adapted by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, performed to perfection by Fanny Ardant and Robert Hirsch about the last days of Sarah Bernhardt. The play concentrates on an uneasy relationship between Sarah and her servant to whom she dictates her memoir, as well as a fragile relationship between her memories, actual history and reality.
Hôtel des deux mondes
Author
The Libertine
Screenplay
French philosopher Denis Diderot produces the first encyclopedia while indulging in 18th-century decadence.
The Libertine
Dialogue
French philosopher Denis Diderot produces the first encyclopedia while indulging in 18th-century decadence.
Heavy Weather
Writer
Over the course of five seasons, this film chronicles a young woman's rise to power within a tempestuous all-female office. Employing elements of fantasy, realism, drama and satire, much of the story takes place in the confines of an oppressive looking steel and glass skyscraper owned by a powerful insurance company. Though the office is populated only by women, the place seethes with tension due to office politics and the personal turmoil suffered by the employees, something that the beautiful and outwardly ruthless office supervisor Carabosse does her best to ignore. When the ever business-like Carabosse finally gets promoted, she appoints Agate (the story's true protagonist) as her successor. Power corrupts and it does not take long for the compassionate Agate to transform into a copy of Carabosse.