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Marcel Pagnol (February 28, 1895 – April 18, 1974) was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. In 1946, he became the first filmmaker elected to the Académie Française.

Born February 28, 1895 in Aubagne, Bouches-du-Rhône département, in southern France near Marseille, the eldest son of school teacher Joseph Pagnol and seamstress Augustine Lansot, Marcel Pagnol grew up in Marseille with his younger brothers Paul, René, and younger sister Germaine.

School years

He learned how to read at a young age to his father's amazement but his mother did not allow him to touch a book until he was six "for fear of cerebral explosion". During this time he spent many summers with his family in a house, the Bastide Neuve, in the sleepy Provençal village of La Treille in the hills between Aubagne and Marseille.

He was only 15 years old when his mother died on 16 June 1910 at the age of 36 years. His father remarried in 1912.

In 1913 at the age of 18 he passed his bac in philosophy and started studying literature at the University in Aix-en-Provence. When the First World War broke out he was mobilised in the infantry at Nice but in January 1915 he was declared unfit for military service due to his feeble constitution.

On 2 March 1916, he married Simone Colin in Marseille, to the displeasure of his father. In November of the same year he passed his licence in English and became an English teacher. He taught in various local colleges and was promoted to work in the lycee in Marseille.

Paris : teacher and playwright

He relocated to Paris where he taught English until 1927, when he decided instead to devote his life to playwriting. From the time that he moved to the capital he joined a group of young writers. In collaboration with one of these friends, Paul Nivoix, he wrote the play, Merchants of Glory, which was produced in 1924.

He wrote Topaze in 1928 a satire based on ambition.

Exiled in Paris he began to think with nostalgia of his roots. Taking this as his setting, in 1929 he wrote Marius.

This would later be turned into Pagnol's first film in 1931.

Separated from Simone Collin since 1926, he met the young English dancer Kitty Murphy. Together they had Jacques Pagnol in 1930, who became his assistant after the war and subsequently a cameraman for France 3 Marseille.

Filmmaking

The year 1926 was decisive for his career; he was present at the projection, in London of one of the first talking films and he was so overwhelmed that he decided to devote his efforts to cinema of this kind. Straightaway he contacted Paramount Picture studios and suggested an adaptation of his play Marius, which he directed with Alexander Korda. It came out on 10 October 1931 and was one of the first successful talking films in the French language.

In 1932 Marcel Pagnol founded his own film production studios in the countryside near Marseille. Over the next decade Pagnol produced his own films. He himself took on many different roles in the production : financier, director, script writer, head of the studios and translator of foreign scripts. These films employed the greatest french actors of that time.

Marcel Pagnol was elected a member of the Académie Française in 1946. He was the first film maker ever to receive this honour.

The birth of a novelist

In 1949 his second daughter from his second marriage died at the age of 2. He was so devastated that he fled the south and returned to live in Paris. He went back to writing plays, but after his next piece was badly received he decided to change his job once more and began writing a series of autobiographical novels – Souvenirs d'enfance – based on his childhood experiences. In 1957, the first two novels in the series, La Gloire de mon père and Le château de ma mère were published to instant acclaim. The third Le Temps de secrets]] was published in 1959; though the fourth Le Temps de l'amour was to remain unfinished and was not published until 1977, after his death. In the meantime, Pagnol turned to a second series, L'Eau des collines – Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources – which focused on the machinations of Provençal peasant life at the turn of the twentieth century.

Pagnol died in Paris on April 18, 1974. He is buried in the municipal cemetery at La Treille, along with his mother and father, brothers, and wife. His boyhood friend, David Magnan (Lili des Bellons in the autographies), died at the Second Battle of the Marne in July 1918, and is buried nearby.

Pagnol adapted his own film Manon des Sources, which starred his wife in the titular role, into two novels, Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, collectively titled L'Eau des Collines. In the 1980s, both books were adapted back into film by film-maker Claude Berri, to international acclaim. Pagnol's affectionate reminiscences of childhood, La Gloire de mon père and Le château de ma mère were also filmed successfully by Yves Robert in 1990.