Portal:Belgium/Selected article/2008/January
Count
In 1889, he became famous overnight after his first play,
According to an article published in the
essayist writing in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life.
Pelléas et Mélisande (1892). Nevertheless, his greatest contemporary success was the fairy play L'Oiseau Bleu (The Blue Bird, 1908). This play has been made into several films, including one in Technicolor from 1940, starring Shirley Temple, and the joint United States/Soviet Union production The Blue Bird (Russian: Sinyaya Ptitsa, 1976), starring Elizabeth Taylor
.
New York Times in 1940, he arrived in the United States from Lisbon. He had fled to Lisbon in order to escape the Nazi invasion of both Belgium and France. The Times quoted him as saying, "I knew that if I was captured by the Germans I would be shot at once, since I have always been counted as an enemy of Germany because of my play, 'Le Bourgmestre de Stillemonde,' which dealt with the conditions in Belgium during the German Occupation of 1918." He returned to Nice
after the war and died there in 1949.