World War II
In September 1939 Tati was conscripted back into his 16th Regiment of Dragoons which was then incorporated into the 3rd Division Legere de Cavalerie (DLC). He saw action in the Battle of the Meuse, in May 1940, when the German Army marched through the Ardennes into northern France. The 3rd DLC retreated from Meuse to Mussidan in the Dordogne where the division was demobilised after the Armistice was declared on the 22nd of June, 1940.
Returning to Paris, Tati resumed his civilian profession as a cabaret performer, finding employment at Léon Volterra's Lido de Paris, where he performed his Sporting Impressions from 1940-42.
At the Lido de Paris he met and fell in love with the young Austrian/Czech dancer Herta Schiel, who had fled Vienna with her sister Molly at the time of the Anschluss. In the summer of 1942 Herta gave birth to their daughter, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel. Due to pressure from his sister Nathalie, Tati refused to recognise the child and was forced by Volterra to depart from the Lido at the end of the 1942 season. In 1943, after a short engagement at the A.B.C, where Édith Piaf was headlining, Tati left Paris under a cloud, with his friend Henri Marquet, and they settled in the Village of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre. While residing there they completed the script for L'École des facteurs (The School for Postmen) that would later provide material for his first feature, Jour de fête.
Herta Schiel would remain in Paris throughout the war, where she would make acquaintance with the physician Jacques Weil when he was called upon to treat her sister Molly for the then-incurable tuberculosis (TB). Through Weil, second in command of the Juggler network of the SOE F Section networks, both sisters were recruited into the French Resistance.
In 1944, Tati returned to Paris and, after a brief courtship, married Micheline Winter.
Considered as a possible substitute for Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis, he played the ghost in Sylvie and the Ghost (Sylvie et le fantôme) (Claude Autant-Lara appeared as Sylvie) and also appeared as The Devil in the same film. Here he met Fred Orain, studio director of St. Maurice and the Victorine in Nice.
Read more about this topic: Jacques Tati
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“... perhaps there exists only one intelligence from which the world sublets, one intelligence toward which each person, from the depths of his individual body, directs his gaze, as in the theater where, though each has a seat, however, there is only one stage.... But if it we all shared the same intelligence, [Bergotte] would, upon hearing me express [my ideas], remember them, love them, smile at them....”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice—is often the means of their regeneration.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)