The poet and playwright René de Obaldia died Thursday at the age of 103. He was part of the French Academy since 1999.
Asked about the death of its dean, announced by several French media, the guardian institution of the French language confirmed the information. But she does not know more about the circumstances of the death, she added.
René de Obaldia, born in 1918 in Hong Kong, had published shortly before reaching his 100th birthday ‘Perles de vie’ at Grasset, where he noted the proverb: ‘To become a centenarian, you have to start young’.
This son of a Frenchwoman and a Panamanian, a diplomat in the city under British control, had then grown up in Amiens, in the region of his mother, then in Paris, where he had very early demonstrated his literary skills.
A jack-of-all-trades writer
A prisoner during the Second World War, he then became a jack-of-all-trades writer, with a biting humour, cultivating detachment. “I have always had this derisory side in me, which allowed me to put certain things at a distance”, he declared to the weekly L’Express in 2009.
In 1959, for example, he published a premonitory book: ‘Le Centenaire’, a long romantic monologue by an old man who dwells on a multitude of memories.
His theatrical work earned him worldwide fame, with plays such as ‘Du vent dans les branches de sassafras’, ‘Monsieur Klebs et Rozalie’ or ‘La Rue Obaldia’.
In his introduction to ‘Perles de vie’, he welcomed an ‘existence rich in metamorphoses: poems, novels, theatre, memoirs’.
/ ATS