Édouard de Max

As a student at the Paris Conservatoire he won prizes for tragedy and comedy, but it was as a tragedian that he became celebrated, appearing in classic works by Shakespeare, Racine, Schiller, Victor Hugo and others, as well as new works by writers including Oscar Wilde, Victorien Sardou and Henri Bernstein.

De Max's career was curtailed by ill health, and within two months of his final performance, at the Comédie-Française, he died at his Paris home at the age of 55.

[2] His father was the physician Emil Max, whose home regularly hosted actors, cultural figures and writers.

[1] Emil was Jewish,[3] while his wife Pulheria descended from two Phanariote (Greco-Romanian) families, the Romalos and Rosettis (or Rusets).

[n 1] Not a very diligent student, according to the memoirist Rudolf Suțu,[6] Eduard attended the first two grades at the National College, following which he was sent to study at Lausanne.

[7] Earlier, in Sinaia, he had appeared on an improvised set beside Elena Văcărescu in an André Theuriet play; despite public enthusiasm, no Bucharest theatre hired him.

He was a flamboyant personality, "flirtatious, outrageously camp",[8] according to a biographer, and had a reputation as a gay seducer, although one of his protégés, Jean Cocteau, wrote that this was something of a myth.

[15] At the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt he played in Francesca da Rimini, Théroigne de Méricourt, Werther, Polyeucte and La Sorciere.