Short answers, pulled from the story.
Eugène Ionesco is best known for his pioneering role in the Theatre of the Absurd and for writing The Bald Soprano, which he described as an "anti-play." The play originated from his experience copying sentences out of an English language textbook (the Assimil method) in 1948, and it was first performed in 1950 under the direction of Nicolas Bataille.
Eugène Ionesco was born on the 26th of November 1909 in Slatina, Romania, though many sources incorrectly cite 1912 as his birthdate. Ionesco himself was responsible for the error, having altered the date out of vanity so that his birth year would coincide with the death year of the Romanian playwright Caragiale, whom he idolized.
The Theatre of the Absurd is a label coined by critic Martin Esslin in his book of the same name, grouping Ionesco alongside Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov. Esslin applied the term on the basis of Albert Camus' concept of the absurd. Ionesco disputed the label and denied being an existentialist, insisting the French playwrights were never an organized movement.
The Bald Soprano has been running at the Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris since 1952, when it moved there. It holds the world record for the play staged continuously in the same theatre for the longest time.
Bérenger is a semi-autobiographical character who appears across several of Ionesco's full-length plays, including The Killer, Rhinocéros, and Exit the King. He is described as comically naive and expresses Ionesco's own sense of wonderment and anguish at the strangeness of reality. In Rhinocéros, written in 1959, Bérenger alone refuses to transform into a rhinoceros, expressing Ionesco's horror at ideological conformism.
Ionesco was elected to the Académie française in 1970 and received the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1970 and the Jerusalem Prize in 1973. He also received the Prix Italia in 1963, the Grand Prix National for theatre and the Monaco Grand Prix both in 1969, and honorary doctoral degrees from New York University and the Universities of Leuven, Warwick, and Tel Aviv. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature eight times.