Childhood: Collete was born in 1873 in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne in Burgundy, France to her parents Sido (Adèle Eugénie Sidonie Landoy) and Jules-Joseph Colette.

Friends & Relationships: In 1893 she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, who was 15 years her senior. She divorced the unfaithful Gauthier-Villars in 1906 and took up work in the music halls of Paris, under the wing of Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise de Belboeuf, known as Missy, with whom Colette became romantically involved. In January 1907, Collete caused a scandal when she performed at the Moulin Rouge in a short dance piece called Reve d’Egypte. She played a mummy who ‘comes back to life in a jeweled bra, slowly and seductively unwinds her transparent wrappings, and at the climax of the dance, passionately embraces the archaeologist’ who discovered her – the latter role played by her cross dressing lover Missy. The Moulin Rouge management hoped for a sensation when it opened and they got it – wealthy opponents filled the theatre with hired thugs and when the curtain opened ‘The stage was immediately bombarded with coins, orange peels, seat cushions, tins of candy, and cloves of garlic, while the catcalls, the blowing of noisemakers, and shouts of ‘Down with the Dykes’ drowned out an orchestra of forty musicians. When the archaeologist took the unwrapped mummy in ‘his’ arms to give her a lingering and unfeigned kiss, the uproar reached a fever pitch. The next night a man played the male part, by order of the police. Among Colette's other friends and lesbian lovers were the famous American writer Natalie Barney. She also was involved in a female/male relationship during this time, with the Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio. In 1912 Colette married Henri de Jouvenel, the editor of the newspaper Le Matin. The couple had one daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, known to the family as Bel-Gazou. She divorced Henri de Jouvenel in 1924. Colette married Maurice Goudeket in 1935, making her full name Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette Gauthier-Villars de Jouvenel Goudeket. Maurice Goudeket published a book about his wife, Close to Colette: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman of Genius. An English translation was published in 1957 by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, New York. A controversial figure throughout her life, Colette flaunted her lesbian affairs, and collaborated with the Vichy regime during World War II - while at the same time aiding her Jewish friends, including hiding her husband in her attic all through the war.

Work: French novelist belonging in time to the generation of such authors as Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, André Gide, and Paul Claudel. Colette's career spanned from her early 20s to her mid-70s. She published around 50 novels in total, many with autobiographical elements. Her themes can be roughly divided into idyllic natural tales or dark struggles in relationships and love. All her novels were marked by clever observation and dialogue with an intimate, explicit style. Her most popular novel, Gigi, was made into a Broadway play and a highly successful Hollywood motion picture, Gigi, starring Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan and Leslie Caron. Her first books, the Claudine series, were published under the pen name of her husband, 'Willy', writer, music critic, "literary charlatan and degenerate" who locked Colette in her room until she wrote the required number of pages. Post-war, her writing career bloomed following the publication of Chéri (1920). Chéri tells a story of the end of a six-year affair between an aging retired courtesan, Léa, and a pampered young man, Chéri. Turning stereotypes upside-down, it is Chéri who wears silk pyjamas and Léa's pearls, and who is the object of gaze. And in the end Léa demonstrates all the survival skills which Colette associates with feminity. The story continued in The Last of Chéri (1951), which contrasts Léa's strength and Chéri's fragility, culminating in his suicide. After Cheri, Colette entered the world of modern poetry and paintings centered around Jean Cocteau, who was later her neighbor in Jardins du Palais-Royal. The relationship and life is vividly depicted in their books. By 1927 she was frequently acclaimed as France's greatest woman writer. "It ... has no plot, and yet tells of three lives all that should be known," wrote Jannet Flanner of Sido on its publication in 1930. "Once again, and at greater length than usual, she has been hailed for her genius, humanities and perfect prose by those literary journals which years ago ... lifted nothing at all in her direction except the finger of scorn." The French novelist lived life to the full in Fin de Siecle Paris, a period described by her biographer as ‘the era of cranks and séances

Greatest Achievements: Colette was a member of the Belgian Royal Academy (1935), president of the Académie Goncourt (1949) (and the first woman to be admitted into it, in 1945), and a Chevalier (1920) and a Grand Officier (1953) of the Légion d'honneur. When she died in Paris on August 3, 1954, she was given a state funeral, although she was refused Roman Catholic rites because of her divorce. Colette is interred in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

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