Marquis de Sade(1740-1814)
- Writer
Born a rich nobleman, Marquis being his title rather than his birth
name, De Sade gradually became a decadent libertine among the French
society of Louis XVI. A liberally educated iconoclast, he wrote prose
and verse, and specialized in testing the limits of decency, breaking
taboos and shocking the aristocracy, often with sordid details drawn
from real life. He was thought to have committed much of the
perversions and debauchery he had written about. He was incarcerated in
an asylum shortly before the French Revolution. After a decade of
feverish creativity, he willingly gave up writing and lived his
remaining years in uneventful calm. De Sade has been portrayed in movie
and TV by Daniel Auteuil, Stuart Devenie, Keir Dullea, Robert Englund,
Klaus Kinski, Patrick Magee, Nick Mancuso, Geoffrey Rush, Brother
Theodore, and Conrad Veidt.
