Aurenche, Jean (1904-1992)

French screenwriter. He was skilled at adapting literary works, including Stendhal's The Red and the Black/Le Rouge et le Noir (1954), Zola's L'Assommoir as Gervaise (1956), and Dostoevsky's The Gambler/Le Joueur (1958). Aurenche wrote or co-wrote the screenplays of 50 films, among them some of the finest French cinema has produced.

Aurenche was born in Provence, and directed advertising films and documentaries before embarking on a screenwriting career in 1937. His first major success was with Hotel du Nord (1938), and from 1943 onwards much of his best writing was in collaboration with French writer Pierre Bost (1901-1975). Their joint credits also include Devil in the Flesh/Le Diable au Corps (1947), a romantic account of a love affair between a teenage boy and an older woman, and the anticlerical black comedy The Red Inn/L'Auberge Rouge (1951), which for six years was banned by the British censor. The advent of the New Wave in the 1960s briefly caused the form of classical screenwriting practised by Aurenche and Bost to become unfashionable, but they returned to strength during the 1970s, in particular with L'Horloger de St Paul (1974), an adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel.