Background
Philippe Labro was born on August 27, 1936 in Montauban, Tarn-Et-Garonne, France.
204 W Washington St. Lexington, VA 24450, United States
Philippe Labro attended Washington and Lee University in Virginia.
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States
Philippe Labro attended the University of Washington.
(Set in a small town in southwestern France, The Little Bo...)
Set in a small town in southwestern France, The Little Boy is the endearing story of a boy's coming-of-age during World War II.
https://www.amazon.com/petit-gar%C3%A7on-Folio-French-ebook/dp/B07G55LF6H/?tag=2022091-20
1992
journalist screenwriter autobiographer
Philippe Labro was born on August 27, 1936 in Montauban, Tarn-Et-Garonne, France.
Philippe Labro attended the University of Washington. After that he attended Washington and Lee University in Virginia.
Philippe Labro was quite young when his family fled Nazi- occupied France and took up residence in Colorado. He worked for a summer as a woodsman in the Rockies. His time abroad left a deep impression on Labro and gave him a taste for contemporary American novelists, particularly Ernest Hemingway. Labro returned to France in the late 1950s and settled into cafe society, hobnobbing with literary and cinematic celebrities. The contacts he made were invaluable in developing his career in writing and journalism. His first journalistic success came with an interview of French poet Blaise Cendrars. But he really found his metier in a series of reports about American G.I.s posted in and around Paris. One piece recounted the resourcefulness of three soldiers from Tennessee who were making moonshine in a clandestine still. This reportage earned Labro a full-time job at Marie-France; he joined the staff of France-Soir, France’s greatest daily newspaper, in 1959.
From then on Labro worked often as a foreign correspondent, posting dispatches from such exotic locales as Vietnam, Pakistan, and Hollywood. His coverage of the French-Algerian War resulted in his 1967 book, Des Feux Mal Eteints (“Poorly Extinguished Fires”). He wrote two books about the 1968 French student uprising, both published in 1969. For Ce N’est Qu’un Debut (“This Is Only a Beginning”), Labro interviewed not only many of the leaders of the movement but also the Workers and students who manned the barricades. His L'Barricades de Mai (“The Barricades of May”) is a chronology — with many photographs — of the May student riot.
Labro began to practice filmmaking during the 1960s. In 1966 Labro played himself in one of Jean-Luc Goddard’s best-received films, Made in the U.S.A., which is a mystery about a woman’s efforts to find her lover’s killer. He also acted in Claude Lelouch’s 1975 film Chat et la Souris (“Cat and Mouse”), about a Paris police detective on the trail of a murderer. He wrote and directed several movies beginning in 1969 — among them Tout Peut Arriver (“Don’t Be Blue”) in 1969, a film which he directed only, L'Heritier (“The Inheritor”) and Sans Mobile Apparent (title means “Without Apparent Motive") in 1972, L'Alpagueur in 1976, La Crime in 1983, and Rive Droite, Rive Gauche (“Right Bank, Left Bank”) in 1984.
Labro wrote several memoirs and autobiographical novels in the 1980s and 1990s. The 1986 novel Etudiant Etranger (published as The Foreign Student in the United States in 1988) and the 1988 book Un Ete Dans I'Ouest (published as One Summer Out West in the United States in 1990) both have as protagonists college-age French men learning about life and love in the United States. The protagonist of Etudiant Etranger is a scholarship student attending an elite Virginia university in the mid-1950s.
Labro’s alter ego in Un Ete Dans I’Ouest is a nineteen-year-old foreign exchange student out for adventure on his summer break in 1955. While hitchhiking out west to take a job with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado, he has an affair with a folksinger and a run-in with two escaped prisoners in a stolen car. His co-workers at the forest service call the frail college student in their midst “Frenchy” and do not respect him at first.
Labro turned to childhood memories for inspiration for two novels, Le Petit Garcon (title means “The Little Man") in 1990 and Quinze Ans (title means “Fifteen Years”) in 1992. Le Petit Garcon, set in occupied France during World War II, has a small boy as its protagonist. The youngest of seven children, he watches as a series of strangers — German soldiers and German Jewish refugees — invade his hamlet. Quinze Ans, a sequel for Le Petit Garcon, tells a story from the point of view of a fifteen-year-old boy coming of age in 1950s Paris. Labro has written two books of autobiography which have been popular in France. Un Debut a Paris (title means “A Debut in Paris”), published in 1994, tells the story of Labro’s early career in journalism.
From 1985 to 2000, Labro was director of programmes at RTL becoming the vice president of the station in 1992.
(Set in a small town in southwestern France, The Little Bo...)
1992Philippe Labro's wife is Francoise Labro and they have four children.