She was natural inside Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, in the Burgundy Region of France, the girl of Jules-Joseph Colette & Adele Eugenie Sidonie Landoy ('Sido'). Around 1893 she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, who was Fifteen years her senior. Her number one books, a Claudine series, were published under the nom de plume of her married man, 'Willy'.

She divorced a unfaithful Gauthier-Villars within 1906 and took up operate in the music halls of Paris, under the wing of the Marquise de Belboeuf, referred to as Young lady, sustaining whom Colette was besides romantically exposed. Colette married Henri de Jouvenel, the editor of Le Matin newspaper, in 1912. A few experienced 1 girl, Colette de Jouvenel, known to the family when Bel-Gazou. Colette de Jouvenel afterwards stated that her mother did non need the tike & left her girl in the care of an English nanny, sole seldom coming to visit her.

Inside 1914 during World War I, she was approached to write a ballet for a Opéra diamond state Paris which she outlined under the title "Divertissements pour ma fille". Fallowing Colette herself chose Maurice Ravel to write a music, he reimagined the operate as an opera to which Colette agreed. She completed a finished libretto to ''L'Enfant et les sortilèges which Ravel received in 1918 and was first performed March 21, 1925. [http://www.laphil.org/resources/piece_detail.cfm?id=93]

Post-war, her writing career bloomed charted a publication of Chéri (1920). She published around fifty novels in aggregate, numbers of by having autobiographical elements. Her themes may be about divided into idyllic natural tales or even dark struggles within relationships & love. Totally her novels were marked by clever observation & dialogue sustaining an intimate, expressed style.

Her virtually all popular novel, Gigi, was made into the Broadway play as well as a extremely successful Hollywood motion picture with the title Gigi'' starring Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, and Leslie Caron.

She divorced Henri de Jouvenel within 1924 after a lot talked just about affair by having her stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel. She married Maurice Goudeket in 1935, making her full title Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette Gauthier-Villars first state Jouvanel Goudeket.

The provocative figure throughout her life, Colette engaged within lesbian affairs while she was between hubby, & collaborated by owning a Vichy regime during World War II. When you took World War I she was the mercenary journalist & converted her page into a hospital.

She was the member of the Belgian Royal Academy (1935), president of the Académie Goncourt (1945) (& the 1st woman to become admitted into it), & the Chevalier (1920) and a Grand Officier (1953) of the Légion d'honneur.

Once she died around Paris on August 3, 1954, she was given a state funeral, although she was refused Roman Catholic rites because of her lifestyle. Colette is interred around Le Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France.

Her works include: ''Claudine à l'école (1900) Claudine à Paris (1901) Claudine en ménage (1902) Claudine s'en va (1903) Dialogues de Bêtes (1904) La Vagabonde (1910) L'Envers du music hall (1913) La Paix Chez les Bêtes (1916) L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1917, Ravel opera libretto) Mitsou (1919) Chéri (1920) La Maison de Claudine (1922) Le Blé en Herbe (1923) La Fin de Chéri (1926) La Naissance du Jour (1928) Sido (1929) Le Pur et L'Impur (1932) La Chatte (1933) Duo (1934) Le Képi (1943) Gigi (1945) L'Étoile Vesper (1947) Le Fanal Bleu'' (1949)