Global InformationBenno Vigny information
Benno Vigny (real name Benoit Philippe Weinfeld; 28 October 1889 – 31 October 1965) was a French-German screenwriter, novelist, songwriter, and librettist. Born into a Jewish family in France and raised in Vienna, Austria, Vigny's first significant work as a writer was the libretto for Robert Winterberg's operetta Fasching in Paris (1910). After serving in the French Army during World War I, he began a relationship with Marie-Louise Caussat, the mother of French songwriter Charles Trenet. She divorced her first husband in 1920, and married Vigny in 1922.
Vigny, his new wife, and her children moved to Berlin in the early 1920s. There he established a jazz nightclub which played an instrumental role in the musical development of Charles Trenet during his formative years. He began working as a screenwriter for Vita-Film in 1924. He wrote several screenplays in partnership with other writers, many of them German-British film collaborations. In the early 1930s he relocated to Paris. He continued to write screenplays for a variety of international film companies into the early 1950s. His final screenplay was for the 1951 war drama The Lost One which he co-authored with the film's director, Peter Lorre.
As a novelist, Vigny's best known work was Amy Jolly, die Frau aus Marrakesch (1927) which was marketed as an autobiographical work based on his experiences serving in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco. The people depicted in the novel were allegedly real people Vigny met while in Marrakesh. It was adapted by Paramount Pictures into the 1930 film Morocco. The film starred Marlene Dietrich in an Academy Award nominated performance as a bisexual nightclub singer; a portrayal regarded as an early icon of queer cinema.