Marguerite Duras

About Marguerite Duras

Who is it?: Writer, Director, Actress
Birth Day: April 04, 1914
Died On: 3 March 1996(1996-03-03) (aged 81)\nParis, France
Birth Sign: Taurus
Occupation: Novelist playwright filmmaker
Period: 1943–1995
Spouses: Robert Antelme Dionys Mascolo

Marguerite Duras Net Worth

Marguerite Duras was born on April 04, 1914, is Writer, Director, Actress. Ms. Duras was born in southern Vietnam and lost her father at age 4. The family savings of 20 years bought the family a small plot in Cambodia, but everything was lost in a single season's flooding. The disaster killed her mother as a result. After high school in Saigon, Ms. Duras left Indochina to study law in Paris. As a young woman, she worked as a secretary in France's Ministry of Colonies from 1935 to 1941, before becoming a writer. She wrote 34 novels from 1943 to 1993, and became an enduring part of Paris's intellectual elite. In addition to her writing, she also directed about 16 films. For the film India Song (1975), she won France's Cinema Academy Grand Prix. She claimed to have rescued French president François Mitterand during World War II, when he was a resistance fighter and remained a friend and unconditional campaigner. Her most noted novel is "L'Amant", the story of a girl, from a poor French family in Indochina, who becomes the mistress of a wealthy Indochinese notable's son.
Marguerite Duras is a member of Writer

💰 Net worth: Under Review

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Biography/Timeline

1914

Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu on April 4, 1914 in Gia-Dinh (a former name for Saigon), Cochinchina, French Indochina (now Vietnam); she was the only daughter of two teachers who responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging French people to settle in the colony.

1940

In the 1940s, Duras became an active member of the PCF (the French Communist Party).

1941

At 17, Duras went to France, her parents' native country, where she began studying for a degree in mathematics. She soon abandoned this to concentrate on political science, then law. After completing her studies, through 1941, she worked for the French government in the Ministry of the Colonies; in the 1930s she also changed her name to Marguerite Duras during this period. She married in 1939 to the Writer Robert Antelme.

1942

During World War II, from 1942 to 1944, Duras worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper quotas to publishers (in the process operating a de facto book-censorship system), but she was also a member of the French Resistance as a part of a small group that also included François Mitterrand, who later became President of France and remained a lifelong friend of Duras. During the war, Antelme was deported to Buchenwald in 1944 for his involvement in the Resistance, and barely survived the experience (weighing on his release, according to Duras, just 38 kg). She nursed him back to health, but they divorced once he recovered his health.

1943

In 1943, for her first published novel Les Impudents, she decided to use as pen name the surname of Duras, a village in the Lot-et-Garonne département, where her father's house was located.

1958

Other major works include Moderato Cantabile (1958), which was the basis of the 1960 film Seven Days... Seven Nights; Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964); and her play India Song, which Duras herself later directed as a film in 1975. She was also the Screenwriter of the 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour, which was directed by Alain Resnais. Duras's early novels were fairly conventional in form, and were criticized for their "romanticism" by fellow Writer Raymond Queneau; however, with Moderato Cantabile, she became more experimental, paring down her texts to give ever-increasing importance to what was not said. She was associated with the nouveau roman French literary movement, although she did not belong definitively to any one group. She was noted for her command of dialogue.

1980

Many of her works, such as Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein and L'Homme assis dans le couloir (1980), deal with human sexuality. Her films are also experimental in form; most eschew synchronized sound, using voice over to allude to, rather than tell, a story; spoken text is juxtaposed with images whose relation to what is said may be more-or-less indirect. Despite her success as a Writer, Duras's adult life was also marked by personal challenges, including a recurring struggle with alcoholism. In 1983 she was awarded the Grand Prix du Théâtre de l’Académie française.

1984

Duras was the author of many novels, plays, films, interviews, essays, and works of short fiction, including her best-selling, highly fictionalized autobiographical work L'Amant (1984), translated into English as The Lover, which describes her youthful affair with a Chinese man. It won the Goncourt prize in 1984. The story of her adolescence also appears in three other books: The Sea Wall, Eden Cinema and The North China Lover. A film version of The Lover, produced by Claude Berri and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, was released to great success in 1992. Duras's novel The Sea Wall was first adapted into the 1958 film This Angry Age by René Clément, and again in 2008 by Cambodian Director Rithy Panh as The Sea Wall.

1996

Duras died of throat cancer in Paris in 1996, aged 81. Her funeral, held in the packed church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, was highlighted with several musical recordings, including a piano version of "India Song". She is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.