Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud (born September 5, 1896, in Marseilles; died March 4, 1948 in Paris)

French playwriter, poet, actor and director

Artaud's parents were partly Levantine/ partly Greek; as a child, he suffered serious health deseases ( attack of meningitis, neuralgia, stammering and severe bouts of depression) and his parents arranged a long series of prolonged and expensive sanatorium stays for their son. This period lasted five years, with a break of two months, June and July 1916, when Artaud was conscripted into the army. He was allegedly discharged due to his self-induced habit of sleepwalking. During Artaud's "rest cures" at the sanatorium, he read Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Poe. In May 1919, the director of the sanatorium, Dr. Dardel, prescribed laudanum for Artaud, precipitating a lifelong addiction to that and other opiates.
In March 1920, Artaud moved to Paris. At the age of 27, Artaud sent some of his poems to the journal "La Nouvelle Revue Française"; they were rejected, but the editor wrote back seeking to understand him, and a relationship in letters was born. This epistolary work, "Correspondence avec Jacques Rivière," is Artaud's first major publication. In November 1926, Artaud was expelled from the surrealist movement, in which he had participated briefly, for refusing to renounce theater as a bourgeois commercial art form, and for refusing to join the French Communist Party along with the other Surrealists.

Artaud cultivated a great interest in cinema as well, writing the scenario for the first Surrealist film, "The Seashell and the Clergyman"; he also acted in Abel Gance's Napoleon in the role of Jean-Paul Marat, and in Carl Theodor Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" as the monk Massieu.
In 1926-28, Artaud ran the Alfred Jarry Theater, along with Roger Vitrac. The Theater was extremely short-lived, but was attended by an enormous range of European artists, including Andre Gide, Arthur Adamov, and Paul Valery.The 1930s saw the publication of "The Theatre and Its Double", his most well-known work. This book contained the two manifestos of the Theater of Cruelty, essential texts in understanding his artistic project.
Artaud received a grant to travel to Mexico where he gave lectures on the decadence of Western civilization. He also studied the Tarahumaran Indians and experimented with the drug peyote, recording his experiences which were later released in a volume called Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara.   
The final phase of Artaud's life was spent in different asylums. When France was occupied by the Nazis, friends of Artaud had him transferred to the Psychiatric hospital in Rodez, well inside Vichy territory, where he was put under the charge of Dr. Gaston Ferdière. Ferdière began administering electroshock treatments to eliminate Artaud's symptoms, which included various delusions and odd physical tics. The doctor believed that Artaud's habits of crafting magic spells, creating astrology charts, and drawing disturbing images, were symptoms of mental illness. In 1946, Ferdière released Artaud to his friends, who placed him in the psychiatric clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine.

In January 1948, Artaud was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. He died shortly afterwards on March 4, 1948. Artaud died alone in his pavilion, seated at the foot of his bed, allegedly holding his shoe. It was suspected that he died from a lethal dose of the drug chloral, although whether or not he was aware of its lethality is unknown.

Partly from Wikipédia