The poet, dramatic and academic author, whose “wind in the branches of Sassafras” was a great success in the 1960s, died on Thursday at the age of 103 years.
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Discreet and facetious author, held by his casualment with the margins of contemporary letters despite his entrance under the dome where he was, since the disappearance of Félicien Marceau in March 2012, the dean of age, René de Obaldia was dead on Thursday 27 January, at the age of 103 .
Jean Vilar revealed him, by putting on the game, a dream comedy given to the recamier theater in 1960. Rita Renoir and Michel Simon made him triumph, playing his most famous room, from the wind in the branches of Sassafras, in 1965. The French Academy immortalized it, by electing it on June 24, 1999, at 22 e left vacant by the death of Julien Green. But the fortunes of time did not spare it, and it is almost forgotten that it disappears today, more than centenary, as the character he imagined at 41 years in one of his rare novels. He had brought lightness to the theater of his time and rejoiced his contemporaries with a fantasy he said inherited from his Hispanic ancestries.
René de Obaldia was count, and Panamae by his father, from an illustrious family. If his bisaïeil, the Liberal José of Obaldia, was an ephemeral president of the Republic of New Granada (1854-1855), his Grand Uncle, José Domingo de Obaldia (1845-1910) was the second President of the Republic of Panama (1908-1910).
Come in Paris from 1904 Undertaking studies of political science at 17, the young José Clemente de Obaldia, pampered orphan and a strong adventurous man, Fit Valser, just 22 years old in the spring of 1909, to the famous Bull bull, young Madeleine Peurvel, daughter of the main cashier in the spring, native to Picardie. He married him in the fall, and soon gave him three children, José, Gisèle, finally René, the youngest, who was born on October 22, 1918, in Hong Kong, British colony where his father was Consul General of Panama. The child did not have time to know him. He had a few months when his mother, tired of the crash of her husband, who kept fleeing for the lowlands of the city, returned to France, where she had a widow from her family.
Passion for German romantics
High by a nanny, then by his grandmother, René de Obaldia studied at Louis-Thuillier Lycée in Amiens, then in Paris at Condorcet High School. Teenager, he takes passion for the German romantics, and decides that he will be a poet. The meeting with the man of art and critic of art André Salmon (1881-1969), co-founder of the poets newspaper (1931), is decisive. Scripture, so. But the “need to communicate” who lives in the young man would cause him to music and painting as to writing, if the required means were as accessible as “a sheet of paper and a pencil on the terrace of A bistro “…
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