GRUMBERG, JEAN-CLAUDE

GRUMBERG, JEAN-CLAUDE (1939– ), French actor and playwright. When Jean-Claude Grumberg was three, his father was deported to Germany and never came back. Working first as a tailor after the war, Grumberg soon began acting, and wrote his first play, Demain une fenêtre sur la rue, in 1968. In 1974, he used some autobiographical material from his childhood and postwar memories to create L'Atelier, a tragi-comedy about women working in a Jewish-owned cloth factory immediately after the war, with the trauma of the Holocaust exposed in a very subtle manner. Other plays include Rixe, Les Vacances, Amorphe d'Ottenburg, Dreyfus, Chez Pierrot, En r'venant d'l'Expo, L'Indien sous Babylone, Zone libre. Grumberg was awarded numerous prizes, including the Theater Prize of the French Academy for Zone Libre, two "Molière" awards (best actor for Zone libre and best playwright for L'Atelier) and in 2000 the SACD Award for lifetime achivement. Grumberg also worked as a screenwriter for TV and film, assisting directors like Marcel Bluwal, François Truffaut, and Costa-Gavras. (Dror Franck Sullaper (2nd ed.)