lit a candle 9h agoI just watched a clip of her talking about writing plays with kids and now I find out she died the same week. 96 years old. That's a whole life well lived.
Their story
Catherine Dasté was a French actress, director, playwright and theatre manager who became one of the pioneers of theatre for young audiences in France. Born into the family that carried on the work of Jacques Copeau, she spent much of her career making plays with and for children, and helped…
Catherine Dasté was a French actress, director, playwright and theatre manager who became one of the pioneers of theatre for young audiences in France. Born into the family that carried on the work of Jacques Copeau, she spent much of her career making plays with and for children, and helped win institutional recognition for theatre aimed at young people.
She was born in Beaune, in Burgundy, on 6 October 1929, the daughter of the actor and director Jean Dasté and the actress Marie-Hélène Dasté, and the granddaughter of Jacques Copeau, one of the great reformers of twentieth century French theatre. She studied drama at the Old Vic in London, where she met the New Zealand born singer Graeme Allwright. They married in 1951 and had three sons, Christophe, Jacques and Nicolas.
In 1959 she and her husband joined the Comédie de Saint-Étienne, where she began a project of plays invented by children. Her first such piece, Les Musiques magiques, was staged there in 1960. In 1967 Ariane Mnouchkine offered her the actors of the Théâtre du Soleil in the mornings to put on a children's show, and the result, L'Arbre sorcier, Jérôme et la tortue, was written with the pupils of a school in Sartrouville. She went on to found the company La Pomme verte, which she led from 1969 to 1980, and with the support of the psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto she created at the Théâtre de Sartrouville the first national drama centre in France devoted to children and young people.
From 1985 to 1992 she directed the Théâtre des Quartiers d'Ivry, following Antoine Vitez and Philippe Adrien. She also directed plays for adults, including Hamlet and works by contemporary writers such as Michel Puig and Jacques Jouet, and ran the Maison Jacques Copeau at Pernand-Vergelesses, where she founded the Rencontres Jacques Copeau and organised them until 2004. She was a guest of honour of the Oulipo literary group in 2010. In November 2025 the Sorbonne Nouvelle University held an international conference and exhibition, Catherine Dasté, un chemin de théâtre, to bring her overlooked career back into the light.
Catherine Dasté died in Ivry-sur-Seine on Thursday 6 August 2026, aged 96. Her children announced her death through the AFP news agency, describing her as one of the first women theatre directors in France and one of those behind the institutional recognition of theatre for young audiences. The Ministry of Culture paid tribute to a woman who had brought theatre for children and young people out of the margins. Her husband Graeme Allwright had died in 2020.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), AFP via franceinfo and BFMTV, L'Humanité and the French Ministry of Culture. Wikipedia ↗
Photos
1Catherine Dasté in 2014
by People Forever
