Biography

Gérard Oury & Les Années Folles

Max-Gérard Oury Tenenbaum was born in 1919, on the threshold of Les Années Folles, and spent his childhood in the tender loving care of his mother Marcelle and grandmother Mouta. They all lived together in Rue de La Tour in Paris, in emotional and artistic harmony. Marcelle, a journalist and art critic for France-Soir, was asked by French fashion mogul Paul Poiret to produce a publicity album (which he grandly termed “a monument”) for him, featuring the leading names in the luxury business and illustrated by artists she knew. The commission changed Marcelle’s life and, for her, marked the start of Les Années Folles (Roaring Twenties).

Gérard, then just six, was caught up in the social whirlwind. His mother’s love of art, and assiduous frequenting of artists, helped sharpen his artistic sensitivity. Marcelle Oury was a small brunette with large, hazelnut eyes, shapely legs, sparkling intelligence and persuasive charm. The fashion of the ’20s suited her perfectly, and she wowed the Paris art world. Her home was soon full of paintings by her friends Dufy, Foujita, Derain and Van Dongen, and Art Deco furniture by Leleu.

Gérard adored Foujita, spent hours in Dufy’s studio watching him paint, and was driven to Deauville in the Hispano Suiza owned by Paul Poiret, who dressed him up like an Indian prince. His mother took him everywhere with her. They would meet Cendrars, Vlaminck and Cocteau for drinks at the newly-opened La Coupole, then move on to Le Dôme to see Braque, Derain and Kisling. Gérard was 10 when he encountered the Queen of Belgium in the corridor of a luxury hotel in Divonne-les-Bains, where he was staying with his grandmother. With no little foresight, Her Majesty promptly declared that “this young fellow will go far!”

Gérard Oury, an actor of precocious talent

Gérard Oury went to school at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, alongside his friends François Perrier and Maurice Siegel. When he was 17 he enrolled at the Cours Simon, where he met and fell in love with the beautiful Jacqueline Roman, elected Miss Exposition 1937. In 1938 he entered the Conservatoire, “dreaming of a life with an uninterrupted stream of adventures born in the imagination of leading playwrights.” In 1939 he joined the Comédie-Française and landed his first rôle, in Britannicus.

World War II saw the Oury family in exile; Jacqueline went with them, as did canvases by Dufy and Foujita, carefully rolled up in the back of the car beneath a pile of luggage. Wherever they went – Bordeaux, Marseille, Monaco, Geneva – Gérard found small rôles to help them get by. His daughter Danièle was born on 3 January 1942.

Back in Paris, after the Libération, Gérard returned to the Comédie-Française, acted in a variety of boulevard theatres, and took several film rôles, notably in Becker’s Antoine et Antoinette and Bernard Delatour’s Duguesclin, where he played Charles V. In La Belle Que Voilà (1949) he kissed Michèle Morgan for the first time. He charmed her more fully ten years later, and they lived together for the next 40 years.

After acting in some sixty films, Oury turned to writing screenplays, with Christian Jaque’s Babette s’en va-t-en-guerre followed by André Cayatte’s Le Miroir à Deux Faces.

Oury the film-maker: Master of comedy

Gérard made his first film, La Main Chaude, in 1959. His directing career took off in the 1960s with Le Corniaud and La Grande Vadrouille, which attracted a total cinema audience of 17 million, sending the tragi-comic wanderings of Bourvil and De Funès into the record-books and cementing Oury’s reputation as the baron of belly-laughs. It was around this time that Gérard began buying pictures by Raoul Dufy, including Bather, a large, rare gouache from around 1911/12, and his 1950 painting In the Paddock. Oury’s career as a director continued apace with Le Cerveau (1968), La Folie des Grandeurs (1971), Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973), La Carapate (1978) and L’As des As (1982); he produced 17 films in all – six of them “classics.”

“To get laughs in the cinema, you need first imagination, then plenty of hard work” observed Oury. In tribute to his cinema career, he was elected a member of France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1998.

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Sale Info

Sales: 1596-1672

Location: Hôtel Marcel Dassault

Sessions: Sale 1596: 20 April at 8pm
Sale 1672: 21 April 2009 at 2:30pm

Auctionner: Francis Briest

Exhibitions

Hôtel Marcel Dassault

Viewing of entire Collection

14-19 April, 11am-7pm

Hôtel Marcel Dassault
7 rond-point des Champs Elysées
F-75008 Paris

Travelling Exhibition

New York (French Embassy)

5-7 March, 11am-7pm

Payne Whitney Mansion
Cultural Services of the French Embassy

972 Fifth Avenue
NY 10021 New York

Cologne (Lempertz)

19-20 March, 11am-6pm

Neumarkt 3
D-50667 Cologne

Zurich (Koller)

26-27 March, 10am-6pm

28 March, 10am-3pm

Hardturmstrasse 102
CH-8031 Zurich

Bruxelles (Lempertz)

2-3 April, 11am-6pm

Rue aux Laines 1
B-1000 Bruxelles

Catalogue

Gérard Oury Collection - Part 1

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Gérard Oury Collection - Part 2

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Department

Modern Art >

Specialist

Violaine de La Brosse-Ferrand

Phone +33 1 42 99 20 32

Press Contact

Armelle Maquin

Phone +33 1 43 14 05 69

Mob. +33 6 11 70 44 74