Ionesco was born in
Slatina, Olt County, to a
Romanian father of the
Orthodox religion and a mother of
French and
Greek-Romanian heritage, whose religion was
Protestant (the religion into which her father was born and to which her originally
Greek Orthodox mother had converted). Eugène himself was baptized into the Romanian Orthodox religion. Many sources cite his birthdate as 1912, this error being due to vanity on the part of Ionesco himself.
He spent most of his childhood in
France, and, while there, had an experience he claimed affected his perception of the world more significantly than any other. As Deborah B. Gaensbauer describes in
Eugene Ionesco Revisited, “Walking in summer sunshine in a white-washed provincial village under an intense blue sky, [Ionesco] was profoundly altered by the light.” He was struck very suddenly with a feeling of intense luminosity, the feeling of floating off the ground and an over-whelming feeling of well-being. When he “floated” back to the ground and the “light” left him, he saw that the real world in comparison was full of decay, corruption and meaningless repetitive action. This also coincided with the revelation that death takes everyone in the end. Much of his later work, reflecting this new perception, demonstrates a disgust for the tangible world, a distrust of communication, and the subtle sense that a better world lies just beyond our reach. Echoes of this experience can also be seen in references and themes in many of his important works: characters pining for an unattainable "city of lights" (
The Killer,
The Chairs) or perceiving a world beyond (
A Stroll in the Air); characters granted the ability to fly (
A Stroll in the Air,
Amédée); the banality of the world which often leads to depression (the
Bérenger character); ecstatic revelations of beauty with in a pessimistic framework (
Amédée,
The Chairs, the Bérenger character); and the inevitability of death (
Exit the King).
He returned to Romania with his father in 1925 after his parents divorced. There he attended
Saint Sava National College, after which he studied
French Literature at the
University of Bucharest from
1928 to
1933 and qualified as a teacher of
French. While there he met
Emil Cioran and
Mircea Eliade, and the three became lifelong friends.
In
1936 Ionesco married Rodica Burileanu. Together they had one daughter for whom he wrote a number of unconventional children's stories. He and his family returned to France in
1938 for him to complete his doctoral thesis. Caught by the outbreak of
World War II in
1939, he remained there, living in
Marseille during the war before moving with his family to Paris after its liberation in 1944.
Ionesco was made a member of the
Académie française in
1970 http://www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/discours_reception/ionesco.html. He also received numerous awards including Tours Festival Prize for film,
1959; Prix Italia,
1963; Society of Authors Theatre Prize,
1966; Grand Prix National for theatre,
1969; Monaco Grand Prix,
1969; Austrian State Prize for European Literature,
1970; Jerusalem Prize, 1973; and honorary doctorates from
New York University and the universities of
Leuven, Warwick and
Tel Aviv. Eugène Ionesco died at age 84 on
March 29, 1994, and is buried in the
Cimetière du Montparnasse, in
Paris. Although Ionesco wrote almost entirely in French, he is one of Romania's most honored artists.
