Film-maker behind ground-breaking international smash hit that brought domestic gay relationships to the mainstream
Édouard Molinaro, the French film director behind the pioneering gay farce La Cage aux Folles, has died at the age of 85 from lung failure.
La Cage aux Folles, itself based on a play by Jean Poiret, starred Michel Serrault and Ugo Tognazzi as a long-term gay couple, one of whose children plans to get married to a stuffy politician's daughter. The pair must conceal their relationship when the prospective in-laws come for dinner. The film was released in 1978 to considerable box office success, in the Us as well as Europe, and broke new ground in the mainstream acceptance of a screen portrayal of domestic gay relationship. It was remade in 1990 as The Birdcage with Nathan Lane and Robin Williams in the lead roles.
Molinaro's feature debut was 1958's Back to the Wall, a blackmail yarn starring Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Oury,...
Édouard Molinaro, the French film director behind the pioneering gay farce La Cage aux Folles, has died at the age of 85 from lung failure.
La Cage aux Folles, itself based on a play by Jean Poiret, starred Michel Serrault and Ugo Tognazzi as a long-term gay couple, one of whose children plans to get married to a stuffy politician's daughter. The pair must conceal their relationship when the prospective in-laws come for dinner. The film was released in 1978 to considerable box office success, in the Us as well as Europe, and broke new ground in the mainstream acceptance of a screen portrayal of domestic gay relationship. It was remade in 1990 as The Birdcage with Nathan Lane and Robin Williams in the lead roles.
Molinaro's feature debut was 1958's Back to the Wall, a blackmail yarn starring Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Oury,...
- 12/9/2013
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
‘La Cage aux Folles’ director Edouard Molinaro, who collaborated with Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles, dead at 85 Edouard Molinaro, best known internationally for the late ’70s box office comedy hit La Cage aux Folles, which earned him a Best Director Academy Award nomination, died of lung failure on December 7, 2013, at a Paris hospital. Molinaro was 85. Born on May 31, 1928, in Bordeaux, in southwestern France, to a middle-class family, Molinaro began his six-decade-long film and television career in the mid-’40s, directing narrative and industrial shorts such as Evasion (1946), the Death parable Un monsieur très chic ("A Very Elegant Gentleman," 1948), and Le verbe en chair / The Word in the Flesh (1950), in which a poet realizes that greed is everywhere — including his own heart. At the time, Molinaro also worked as an assistant director, collaborating with, among others, Robert Vernay (the 1954 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Jean Marais) and...
- 12/8/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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