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- Véronique Vendell was born on 21 July 1942 in Lodève, Hérault, France. She is an actress, known for Barbarella (1968), Cross of Iron (1977) and I Knew Her Well (1965). She was previously married to Wolf C. Hartwig.
- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
At the least George Auric was a fine musician, having been a child prodigy, but he was much more in the musical world. He studied under Vincent D'Indy (a devotee of Cesar Franck and the German school of symphonic composition) and attended the Paris Conservatory (1920). By the time he was 20 he had orchestrated and written incidental music for ballets and the stage. With some interest in the avant garde, he became a friend of Erik Satie and playwright Jean Cocteau and joined their friends, the musical group "Les Six", whose members were impressive: Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre (the only woman member), and Louis Durey. Auric moved into music criticism for a short time and then began composing for poetic and other textual formats from his Les Six associations. But his stylistic development would prove to be very classical in sympathy.
He especially continued his association with Cocteau who finally turned to films, and Auric turned to writing film scores. Their first collaboration was Cocteau's Blood of the Poet (1930). But Auric did the scores of many small format movies with other French directors through the 1930s and the war years. He was also interested in what the British were doing in film work. His first UK score was for Dead of Night (1945), a stylish horror film. The same year he also scored the Bernard Shaw comedic Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) with Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh. The next year he scored perhaps his most famous musical partnership with Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast (1946). Auric's haunting, subdued music for the movie would be typical of his inventive style of transparent orchestration in which he might use only a few instruments at a time in a particular passage but eventually employ all the usual orchestral instrumentation in this progression to convey the whole of his score. Auric's music (here Stravinsky-like) provided the perfect atmospheric score for the eerie British horror classic The Queen of Spades (1949).
Auric's first American score very much displayed his depth in conveying the nuances of mood change in a story musically. This was the wonderful, bittersweet comedy Roman Holiday (1953), directed by William Wyler and introducing a vivacious Audrey Hepburn to the silver screen. On through the 1950s and into the 1960s Auric was very busy with scores predominately of French films but some notable British and American efforts as well. Among several for the English language were the charming American war drama Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) with Deborah Kerr and - with Kerr again - the spooky 'Henry James' novel ("Turn of the Screw") UK adaptation The Innocents (1961). For the remainder of the 1960s and sporadically in the mid 1970s, Auric did some additional scoring, mostly French TV, but he was busy elsewhere as of 1962 being director of Paris Opera. Providing a unique finesse to film music, George Auric contributed nearly 130 scores, placing him along side some of the most prolific of the contemporary Hollywood film composers.- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Frédéric Saurel was born in 1967 in Lodève, Hérault, France. He is an actor and producer, known for Rock'n'roll Control (1993), Serial Bad Weddings (2014) and Bâtards (2002).- Actor
- Writer
Habib Kadi was born on 19 May 1973 in Lodève, France. He is an actor and writer, known for Arapski, Final Round (2021) and Marrakech du rire (2011).- Joseph Vallot (Henri Marie Joseph of his real name) is a French astronomer, geographer, naturalist, mountaineer and patron, born February 16, 1854 in Lodève and died April 11, 1925 in Nice.
He left Lodève to join the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris, studied botany and geology. He was appointed vice-president of the Société Botanique de France and later president of the Club Alpin Français.
In 1875 when he went to a geology congress held in Chamonix, he fell in love with Mont Blanc. At that time, despite the few scientific observations made by the Genevan naturalist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, everything still remained to be discovered about life at altitude, the movement of glaciers, etc. He made his first ascent in 1881 in 1887, to prove that it was possible to live, sleep, eat and work at such a high altitude, Vallot and his guides spent three nights in a tent at the top of Mont Blanc. On their descent, they receive a triumphal welcome. That same year, Vallot made the ascent five times. For the next three years, he continued his observations while negotiating, with the municipality of Chamonix and the company of guides, the conditions for the construction of a refuge-laboratory on the site of Rocher des Bosses located just 450 meters below the Mountain peak. He obtained 800 francs from the municipality and 200 francs from the guides and invested 5,500 francs.
In 1890, 110 guides and porters climbed in eight days on their backs (15 to 30 kg each) the materials necessary for the construction of a hut of 5 meters by 3 with two rooms, the first serving as a refuge and the second as a laboratory. . This first observatory was built at an altitude of 4,362 m and was completed at the end of August 1890. The Vallot refuge, reserved for guides and climbers, was built in 1892 a little further on at 4,365 m. In the 21st century, this refuge no longer welcomes mountaineers. It belongs to the CNRS and is still used by scientists who study physiology at altitude. In 1898, an observatory was built on a surface of 60 m2 comprising eight rooms with improved comfort. A metal annex, on the other hand, is permanently accessible and allows mountaineers to rest or take refuge in bad weather.
Joseph Vallot also worked on a train project that was to take tourists to the summit of Mont Blanc and on the first Aiguille du Midi cable car project, the first section of which Les Pélerins - La Para was inaugurated in 1924, constituting the first cable car in France. A second section up to the Glaciers was completed after his death in 1927 and a third up to the Col du Midi, started in the 1930s, remains as a service line.
Passionate about photography, he brought back many remarkable shots from his mountain expeditions. The Alpine Museum of Chamonix keeps many documents concerning him and has reconstructed the Chinese room of its observatory.
Joseph Vallot will also help his cousin, the engineer Henri Vallot, to produce, from 1892, the 1/20,000th map of the Mont-Blanc massif. Work completed after his death by his little cousin Charles Vallot who will launch the collection of Vallot guides for mountaineers.