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Gaston Leroux

For other people named Gaston Leroux, see Gaston Leroux (disambiguation).
Gaston Leroux
Leroux in 1907
Leroux in 1907
BornGaston Louis Alfred Leroux
(1868-05-06)6 May 1868
Paris, France
Died15 April 1927(1927-04-15) (aged 58)
Nice, France
OccupationJournalist, author
NationalityFrench
Notable worksThe Phantom of the Opera

Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux (6 May 1868 – 15 April 1927) was a French journalist and author of detective fiction.

In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera (French: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, 1909), which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, notably the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical. His 1907 novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room is one of the most celebrated locked room mysteries.

Life and career

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Leroux was born in Paris in 1868, the illegitimate child of Marie Bidaut and Dominique Leroux, who married a month after his birth. He claimed an illustrious pedigree, including descent from William II of England (in French, Guillaume le Roux), son of William the Conqueror, and social connections such as having been the official playmate of Prince Philippe, Count of Paris at the College d'Eu in Normandy.[1][2] After schooling in Normandy and studying as a lawyer in Caen (graduating in 1889), He inherited millions of francs and lived wildly until he nearly reached bankruptcy. In 1890, he began working as a court reporter and theater critic for L'Écho de Paris. His most important journalism came when he began working as an international correspondent for the Paris newspaper Le Matin in 1893. He was present at, and covered, the 1905 Russian Revolution.

He left journalism in 1907, after returning from covering a volcanic eruption and being immediately sent on another assignment without vacation time, and began writing fiction. In 1919, he and Arthur Bernède formed their own film company, Société des Cinéromans, publishing novels and turning them into films. He first wrote a mystery novel titled Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1907; English title: The Mystery of the Yellow Room), starring the amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille.[3] Leroux's contribution to French detective fiction is considered a parallel to those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the United Kingdom and Edgar Allan Poe in the United States.

Leroux published his most famous work, The Phantom of the Opera, as a serial in 1909 and 1910, and as a book in 1910 (with an English translation appearing in 1911).[4] Balaoo followed in 1911, which was made into a film several times (in 1913, 1927 and 1942).

Leroux was made a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur in 1909. He died at age 58 in Nice, France, in 1927.

Personal life

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Leroux married twice, first to Marie Lefranc from whom he separated in 1902. Following his separation, he then lived with Jeanne Cayatte from Lorraine, with whom he had a son, Gaston, nicknamed Milinkij, and daughter Madeleine; they married in 1917 after Lefranc's death.[1][2] In 1918, he founded a film production company, Société des Cinéromans with René Navarre and debuted two films Tue-la-Mort and Il etait deux petits enfants, in which his daughter played the lead role.[5]

Novels

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The Adventures of Rouletabille

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Chéri Bibi

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Other novels

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Still of Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
Poster of the film adaptation of Balaoo in 1913

Short stories

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Gaston Leroux's "Not' Olympe" was translated into English as "The Mystery of the Four Husbands" and published in the December 1929 issue of Weird Tales.

Plays

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Filmography

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Screenwriter

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Misattributions

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The Gaston Leroux Bedside Companion, an anthology published in 1980 and edited by Peter Haining, as well as the Haining-edited The Real Opera Ghost and Other Tales By Gaston Leroux (Sutton, 1994), include a story attributed to Leroux entitled The Waxwork Museum. A foreword alleges that the translation by Alexander Peters first appeared in Fantasy Book in 1969 (but no original French publication date is given). Neither "Alexander Peters" nor "Fantasy Book" appear to exist, and the text of the story is, in fact, a word-for-word copy of the story Figures de cire by Andre de Lorde which was published as Waxworks in the 1933 anthology Terrors: A Collection of Uneasy Tales, edited (anonymously) by Charles Birkin. The confusion has sometimes caused Leroux to be erroneously credited with the stories from the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, the 1953 film House of Wax (both of which were based on a story by Charles S. Belden) or, particularly, the 1997 Italian film Wax Mask (for example, in Troy Howarth's Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and His Films). No such story by Leroux exists, though some confusion may have been the result of chapter IX in Leroux's novel La double vie de Théophraste Longuet, which is entitled, Le masque de cire (translated as The Wax Mask).

References

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  1. ^ a b Hogle, J. (2016-04-30). The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux's Novel and its Progeny. Springer. pp. 61–62. ISBN 978-1-137-11288-0.
  2. ^ a b Pellegrini, Laura Paola (2012-04-27). Le Fantôme de l'Opéra by Gaston Leroux: The novel's evolution and its theatrical and cinematic adaptations in the twentieth century. LED Edizioni Universitarie. pp. 20–28. ISBN 978-88-7916-584-6.
  3. ^ Hall, Ann C. (2009-08-11). Phantom Variations: The Adaptations of Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera, 1925 to the Present. McFarland. p. 8. ISBN 978-0-7864-5377-1.
  4. ^ a b Wildgen, Kathryn E. (2001-01-01). "Making the Shadow Conscious: The Enduring Legacy of Gaston Leroux". Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures. 55 (3): 155–167. doi:10.1080/00397700109598539. ISSN 0039-7709. S2CID 192015448.
  5. ^ a b DUBOURG, M (1981). "Gaston Leroux journaliste parisien, journaliste et parisien in G. Leroux". Gaston Leroux Journaliste Parisien, Journaliste et Parisien in G. Leroux. 59 (626–627): 56–65.
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