 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Gaston Leroux (1868-1927) |
|
French mystery novelist, playwright, journalist, and a prolific feuilletonist. Gaston Leroux is best known for his Le Fantôme de l'opéra (1910, The Phantom of the Opera), in which a criminally insane recluse haunts a Paris opera house, and abducts a young and beautiful singer to his cellar retreat. The novel has been a source for several films and stage adaptations, including Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version, first produced in 1987. "The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade." ('Prologue', in The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1911, p. 1) Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux was born in Paris, the son of Dominique Alfred Leroux, a wealthy public contractor, and Marie Bidault. Leroux's grandparents owned a ship-building company in St. Valery-en-Caux, Normandy, where he grew up. While at school, he began writing stories in the style of Aleksanre Dumas and Victor Hugo. To please his father, Leroux abandoned his plans to become a writer and went to Paris to study law, receiving his degree in 1889. His father died later in the same year and after inheriting nearly a million francs, Leroux spent the following six months in his life drinking and gambling. Finding most of his money gone, Leroux started to work as a
theater critic and reporter for L'Écho de Paris.
His
breakthrough piece was a sonnet he composed about an actress. By the
end of 1890 Leroux had become a courtroom reporter. As one of his assignments, he covered
the
Dreyfus affair, in which Alfred Dreyfus, a French army captain of
Jewish heritage, was falsely accused of high treason. Leroux described
the trial
as farce. When Dreyfus was pardoned by the French president and
reinstated into the military with honors, Leroux
wrote: "This moment ... will be a date in the history of justice and
future school children will be no more able to ignore it than they
would the battle of Actium or that of the crowning of Charlemagne". (Phantom Variations: the Adaptations of Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera, 1925 to the Present by Ann C. Hall, 2009, p. 8) Between the years 1894 and 1906 Leroux travelled in different countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia as a correspondent. In Russia he covered the Russian Revolution of 1905. Leroux wrote for the daily newspaper Le Matin and L'echo de Paris. While in Switzerland in 1902, he met Jeanne Cayatte, the love of his life, who became his mistress and bore him two illegitimate children. Because Leroux's wife, Marie Lefranc refused to grant him a divorce, they were not able to marry until she died in 1917. From 1909 Leroux devoted himself entirely to writing, focusing on plays and popular novels of mystery and detection. Often his ideas came to him in dreams. In 1919 Leroux established his own film company called Cinéromans. When Carl Laemmle, the president of Universal Pictures visited Paris on vacation, Leroux gave him a copy of Phantom of the Opera. Fascinated by the book, Laemmle decided to make it into a big budgeted movie. However, at the time of the filming, Leroux was ill at his Paris home, and he did not contribute to its making. Leroux died in Nice on April 15/16, 1927, as a result of an acute urinary. To his final moments, Leroux maintained that his "Opera Ghost really did exist!" Leroux started to write novels in the early 1900s. Between the
years 1903 and 1927 he produced two dozen newspaper serials, many
shorter works and seven plays. In the UK and the USA Leroux's
reputation was long based on his mysteries. His breakthrough work was Le
Mystère de la chambre jaune (1907, The Mystery of the Yellow Room),
which introduced the teenager crime reporter Joseph Josephson aka
Rouletabille, a young journalist with a bullet-shaped head. Its plot included one of the first "locked room" murder motifs.
Mademoiselle Stangerson is found in The Yellow Room, lying on
the floor in the agonies of death. She has cried "Murder! - murder! - help!"
The room is sealed from the inside with a key and bolt, and the blinds
on the only window are also fastened on the inside. Rouletabille's
friend, Sinclair, chronicles the story, and serves as Rouletabille's
own Dr. Watson. The official detective in the case, the least suspected
person, is in fact a notorious criminal, who becomes the hero's
arch-enemy - later a much used bluff. "When
I sat down to pen that story," Leroux recalled, "I decided to go 'one
better' than Conan Doyle, and make my 'mystery' more complete than even
Edgar Allan Poe had ever done in his stories of Mystery and
Imagination. The problem which I set myself was exactly the same as
theirs—that is, I assumed that a crime had been committed in a room
which, as far as exits and entrances were concerned, was hermetically
closed." (The Phantom of the Opera: Centennial Edition, with a new afterword by J.R. Ward, 2011) Le Parfum de la Dame en Noir (1909, The Perfume of the Lady in Black), the sequel to Le Mystère... was less successful than Leroux's first locked room mystery. In the story Rouletabille is reunited with his real mother, Mathilde Stangerson, on the Côte d'Azur, where he tries to track down his father, a criminal genius and master of disguise. Mathilde's perfume has a "Proustian effect" on Rouletabille, or as the narrator Sinclair says: "I have told, too, what chance he was led to one evening to the Elysee, where he inhaled as he passed by the perfume of the Lady in Black. He realized then that it was Mlle. Stangerson who had been his visitor at the school, and for whom he had been seeking so long." (The Perfume of the Lady in Black, McAllister Editions, 2015, p. 27) Le Fantôme de l'opéra resulted from the author's fascination with the Paris Opera House, which really is set above a network of catacombs. Before publishing the novel, Leroux had written an account of the 1896 disaster, in which one of the chandelier's counterweights had fallen down and killed a patron of the playhouse. Leroux also owned the architectural plans of the building and knew about its secret passageways. After a skeleton was found in the Opera cellars, Leroux began to work on the novel by mixing fact and fiction: "In those labyrinthine cellars and the mysterious subterranean lake which was visible through iron grilles in the floor only if a torch was lit to pierce the blackness, there was an atmosphere that seemed to demand that yard to be told." (Phantom Variations: The Adaptations of Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera, 1925 to the Present by Ann C. Hall, 2009, p. 10) Le Fantôme... was first serialized in Le Gaulois, then published in book form, but the work was only a moderate success until newspapers in Great Britain and the United States published a serialized version of the story, with images of the Phantom. The book was translated into English by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. Like Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (1831), Le Fantôme de l'opéra is basically a version of the classic tale 'Beauty
and the Beast', although the ultimate object of fatal obsession is the beauty of music,
embodied in the character of Erik. "Erik was born in a small town not
far from Rouen. He was the son of a master mason. He ran away at an
early age from his father's house, where his ugliness was a subject of
horror and terror to his parents." ('Epilogue', in The Phantom of the Opera, 1911, p. 344) After years of wandering, Erik hides
himself in the corridors and underground locales of the Paris Opera
House. He has helped in the reconstruction of its cellars, and
incorporated many trapdoors in the building. He falls in love with a
young singer, Christiane Daaé, and arranges a series of deaths to
advance her career. Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny, is also in love with
Christine, but she is forbidden by Erik to respond to his advances.
When the Opera managers refuse to make her a star, the unmasking of
Erik's evil side leads to his destruction. "Know,' he shouted, while
his throat throbbed and panted like furnace, 'know that I am built up
of death from head to foot and that this is a corpse that loves you and
adores you and will never, never leave you! . . ." (Ibid., p. 168) The plot is presented as a story pieced together from
journal
entries, alternating first-person narratives, and interviews, revealing
the "true" history of the Opera Ghost. In the classic film version from
1925 Lon Chaney was the victim of torture with a crazed mind. Chaney is
a composer himself and in his obsession with Mary Philbin, a lovely
singer, he drives away the opera's star so that Philbin can have the
lead in Faust. Philbin is twice abducted by the Phantom to his secret
world. The great moment of the film is when the Phantom is unmasked
while playing the organ. As a result of a misfired publicity stunt, the
film was banned in Britain for four years. There were also bad reviews:
"It is impossible to believe there are a majority of picturegoers who
prefer this revolting sort of tale on the screen." (Variety, September 9, 1925; in Some Like It Not: Bad Reviews of Great Movies by Ardis Sillick & Michael McCormick, 1996, p. 209) Robert Bloch, the writer of Psycho (1959), tells that he saw the movie in the theater in his early teens: "On some occasions, when describing the effect on me, I have stated that I paid Chaney the greatest tribute a small boy could possibly bestow—I wet my pants. Now I must confess this wasn't exactly true; merely poetic license, you might say. But I did close my eyes, opening them from time to time only to observe more horrors." (Once around the Bloch by Robert Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography, 1993, p. 45) In 1930 a talkie was issued, with some new footage and dialogue which had been recorded by the surviving actors. Arthur Lubin paid a great deal of attention to music in 1943 in his remake - Nelson Eddy, Susanna Foster and Jane Farrar had singing roles. The Phantom of the Paradise (1974) was Brian de Palma's horror comedy-drama about a disfigured musician haunting a contemporary pop palace. The film was poorly received by many critics but attained a large cult following. Susan Kay's novel Phantom (1990) was based on Leroux's work and won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award; Terry Prachett also played with Leroux's ideas in his Maskerade (1995). The character of Rouletabille has also inspired several films. Henri Fescourt's 10-episode serial, Rouletabille chez les bohémes, was made in 1921, starring Gabriel de Gavrone. Istvan Szekely made Rouletabille aviateur (1932) with Roland Toutain, and Christian Chamborant starred Jean Piat in loose adaptations of Leroux's work, Rouletabille joue et gagne (1946) and Rouletabille contre la dame de pique (1947). In the 1960s the hero appeared in France in a television series. One episode was directed by Yves Boisset. Claude Brasseur played the detective under the direction of Jean Kerchbron. Cheri-Bibi, an adventurer, was perhaps Leroux's most popular character in France. He appeared in such detective novels as Cheri-Bibi (tr. 1914), Cheri-Bibi: Mystery Man (tr. 1916), Missing Men: The Return of Cheri-Bibi (tr. 1923), and The Dark Road; Further Adventures of Cheri-Bibi (tr. 1924). The first film of Chéri Bibi was made in 1913, directed by Gérard Bourgeois and starring René Navarre. Charles Krauss directed Les premieres aventures de Chéri Bibi (1914), starring Emile Keppens. Nouvelle Aurore / Nouvelles aventures des Chéri Bibi (1919) was directed by Edouard-Emile Violet, starring José Davert. Léon Mathot continued the adventures with Pierre Fresnay in Chéri Bibi (1937), and the Italian Marcello (Marcel) Pagliero made Chéri Bibi / Il forzato della Guiana (1955), starring Jean Richard. Leroux's narrative was fast moving, and he often used complicated plots. Later mature work show the influence of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, especially 'The Masque of the Red Death' (1842) in The Phantom... and the tale 'Thou Art the Man', in which the detective turns out to be the murderer - the idea appeared again in The Mystery of the Yellow Room. One of the descendants of Poe's orangutan in Murders in the Rue Morgue is the half-man half-ape Balaoo in Leroux novel of the same name from 1912. At the end of the story the creature concludes: "Animals are animals and gods are gods, but men are nothing at all!" (Balaoo, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, The Perfect Library, 2015, p. 236) In the novella The Burgled Heart (tr. 1925) Leroux employed supernatural elements - the astral body of a French woman is abducted by an English artist. The Kiss that Killed (tr. 1934) and The Machine to Kill (tr. 1935) featured a vampire and a robot as murderers. For further reading: Murder for Pleasure by P. Haining (1941); Hommage à Gaston Leroux (1953); Horror! by D. Douglas (1969); 'Leroux, Gaston' by Arthur Nicholas Athanason, in Twentieth-century Crime and Mystery writyers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and Supernatural, edited by by Jack Sullivan (1986); Something About the Author, edited by D. Olendorf (1991); 'Leroux, Gaston', in World Authors 1900-1950, Volume 3, edited by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); 'Leroux, Gaston' by [Richard Dalby and John Clute], in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant (1997); The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux's Novel and Its Progeny by Jerrold E. Hogle (2002); Phantom Variations: The Adaptations of Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera, 1925 to the Present by Ann C. Hall (2009); Le Fantôme de l'opéra di Gaston Leroux: evoluzione del romanzo e adattamenti cinematografici e teatrali nell'arco del Novecento by Laura Paola Pellegrini (2010); Levinas and the Other in Narratives of Facial Disfigurement: Singing through the Mask by Gudrun M. Grabher (2019); Fantôme de l'opéra: légendes et mystères au Palais Garnier by Gérard Fontaine (2019) - Diverse film adaptations: Alsace (1915), dir. by Henri Pouctal; La sept de trefle (1921) by René Navarre and M. Manzoni; Il êtait deux petits enfants (1927) Selected works:
|
