Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu 4 April 1914 3 March 1996 known as Marguerite Duras was a French novelist playwright screenwriter essayist and experimental filmmaker Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour 1959 earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu on 4 April 1914 in Gia Định Cochinchina French Indochina now Vietnam Her parents Marie née Legrand 18771956 and Henri Donnadieu 18721921 were teachers from France who likely had met at Gia Định High School They both had previous marriages Marguerite had two brothers Pierre the older and the younger Paul Duras father fell ill and he returned to France where he died in 1921 when Duras was seven years old Between 1922 and 1924 the family lived in France while her mother was on administrative leave They then moved back to French Indochina when she was posted to Phnom Penh followed by Vĩnh Long and Sa Đéc The family struggled financially and her mother made a bad investment in an isolated property and area of rice farmland in Prey Nob a story which was fictionalized in Un barrage contre le Pacifique The Sea Wall In 1931 when she was 17 Duras and her family moved to France where she successfully passed the first part of the baccalaureate with the choice of Vietnamese as a foreign language as she spoke it fluently Duras returned to Saigon in late 1932 where her mother found a teaching post There Marguerite continued her education at the Lycée ChasseloupLaubat and completed the second part of the baccalaureate specializing in philosophy In autumn 1933 Duras moved to Paris graduating with a degree in public law in 1936 At the same time she took classes in mathematics She continued her education earning a diplôme détudes supérieures DES in public law and later in political economy After finishing her studies in 1937 she found employment with the French government at the Ministry of the Colonies In 1939 she married the writer Robert Antelme whom she had met during her studies During World War II from 1942 to 1944 Duras worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper quotas to publishers and in the process operated a de facto bookcensorship system She then became an active member of the PCF the French Communist Party and a member of the French Resistance as a part of a small group that also included François Mitterrand who later became President of France and remained a lifelong friend of hers Duras husband Antelme was deported to Buchenwald in 1944 for his involvement in the Resistance and barely survived the experience weighing on his release according to Duras just 38 kg or 84 pounds She nursed him back to health but they divorced once he recovered In 1943 when publishing her first novel she began to use the surname Duras after the town that her father came from Duras LotetGaronne In 1950 her mother returned to France from Indochina wealthy from property investments and from the boarding school she had run Source Article Marguerite Duras from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA