Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jean Cocteau was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist, and critic who lived from 1889 to 1963. He was one of the foremost avant-garde artists of the twentieth century and influenced the Surrealist and Dadaist movements. Despite working across many media, he insisted on calling himself a poet.
Jean Cocteau is most notable for the novels Le Grand Écart, Le Livre blanc, and Les Enfants Terribles, and stage plays including La Voix Humaine, La Machine Infernale, and Les Parents terribles. His best-known films include The Blood of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast, and Orpheus. His 1934 play La Machine infernale is considered his greatest work for the theatre.
The Orphic Trilogy is the name given to Jean Cocteau's films The Blood of a Poet from 1930, Orpheus, and Le Testament d'Orphée from 1960. He both wrote and directed most of his films, which helped introduce the avant-garde into French cinema.
Jean Cocteau died of a heart attack at his château in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne, France, on the 11th of October 1963, at the age of 74. His health had been in decline for months, and he had suffered a severe heart attack on the 22nd of April 1963. A near-certainly apocryphal story says his heart failed on hearing of Édith Piaf's death the day before.
Jean Cocteau met the French poet Raymond Radiguet in 1918, and the two collaborated, socialized, and traveled together. Cocteau helped Radiguet obtain a military exemption and arranged for Grasset to publish his novel Le Diable au corps. After Radiguet's sudden death in 1923, accounts differ over whether Cocteau was left despondent or carried on, leaving immediately for Monte Carlo with Diaghilev.
During the Nazi occupation, Jean Cocteau joined a round-table of French and German intellectuals at the Georges V Hotel in Paris and published a 1942 article, Salut à Breker, praising the sculptor Arno Breker. He was arraigned on collaboration charges after the war but was cleared, having also tried unsuccessfully to save friends such as Max Jacob. He claimed his politics were non-existent and held convictions of pacifism and antiracism.