Jean Cocteau's Real Name: Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau

Quick answer: Jean Cocteau's full real name was Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau. He was born on July 5, 1889, in Maisons-Laffitte, France, and died on October 11, 1963, in Milly-la-Forêt. "Jean Cocteau" is the everyday short form of that civil name—not a invented stage alias.

Full name on the civil record

BnF authority records and standard modernist encyclopedias list Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau, born 5 July 1889 at Maisons-Laffitte near Paris (BnF; Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism). He grew up in a bourgeois family, published poetry as a teenager, and moved through Belle Époque salons into friendships with Picasso, Satie, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and later the surrealist and Catholic circles that marked interwar France. The public brand was always Jean Cocteau; the longer string appears on catalogues and legal documents.

He worked across media: poetry, novels (Les Enfants terribles), plays, drawings, criticism, and film. As a filmmaker he directed Le Sang d'un poète (1930), the classic La Belle et la Bête (1946) with Josette Day and Jean Marais, and the Orpheus trilogy culminating in Orphée (1950) and Le Testament d'Orphée (1960). Those films fixed his visual mythology—mirrors, gloves, poetic death—for international audiences.

Académie, later years, death

Cocteau was elected to the Académie française (1955) and remained a public man of letters while designing chapels, writing journals, and mentoring younger artists. His relationship with actor Jean Marais was among the most visible same-sex partnerships in mid-century French cultural life. He died of a heart attack on October 11, 1963, at Milly-la-Forêt, hours after learning of Edith Piaf's death—a coincidence often noted in obituaries. He is buried at Milly-la-Forêt.

For name researchers: there is no hidden pseudonym to unmask. Jean Cocteau = Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau, the polymath of Maisons-Laffitte.

Beauty and the Beast / Orphée Criterion or Blu-ray sets Cocteau journals / selected writings translations biographies of Cocteau

Library catalogues (BnF, national filmographies) are the safest place to confirm the longer given-name string; popular obituaries often stop at Jean Cocteau. Spelling out Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau here matches how French authority files index him for researchers who arrive via a "real name" query.