Romain Gary

He married Lesley Blanch, an English writer, journalist and editor of Vogue magazine, in 1944. The couple divorced in 1961.

In 1962, he married Jean Seberg, an American actress known for ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ and ‘Breathless’. The couple had a son, Alexandre Diego Gary. The two divorced in 1970.

He shot himself and committed suicide on December 2, 1980, at his Paris apartment, leaving a letter which disclosed that he was Emile Ajar.

Romain Gary was born as Roman Kacew on May 21st, 1914, in Russian Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), into a Jewish family, to businessman Arieh-Leib Kacew and Litvak actress Mina Owczynska.

He got fluent in Russian, Yiddish, Polish, and German as a child. After his father abandoned his family, her mother took him to places across Europe before finally settling in Nice, France, in 1928, where he learnt French at school.

He changed his name to Romain and became a French citizen in 1935. Later in 1940, he adopted the full name ‘Romain Gary’.

He studied law at Aix-en-Provence and later in Paris, graduating in 1938. He then took up pilot training with the French Air Force at Salon-de-Provence and Avord Air Base.

When France was occupied by the Germans during World War II, he escaped to Casablanca, via Algiers, in a two-seater plane and further sailed by sea to England via Gibraltar.

He joined the Free French Forces as a flying officer, serving in Africa, Egypt, Syria and Europe. In 1943, he participated in 25 sorties to drop high explosives on targets, during which he was badly injured.

He completed his first novel and published it in English. It was titled ‘Forest of Anger’, which was later translated in French and released as ‘L’Education europeenne’ in 1945.

He authored novels that combined humor with tragedy and faith with suspicion, such as ‘Tulipe’ (1946), ‘Les Couleurs du jour’ (1952, The Colors of the Day), and ‘La Danse de Gengis Cohn’ (1967, The Dance of Genghis Cohn).

After the war ended, he took up French diplomatic service in Bulgaria in 1947, from where he was transferred to Switzerland.

In 1956, he published his award-winning novel ‘Les racines du ciel’ (The Roots of Heaven), which was honored with Prix Goncourt by the Academie Goncourt.

He became the only person to win a second Prix Goncourt for his 1975 novel ‘La Vie devant soi’ (The Life Beyond Us), under the penname Emile Ajar, even though an author is allowed to receive the award only once.