Jacques Tati - World War II

World War II

In September 1939 Tati was conscripted back into his 16th Regiment of Dragoons which was then incorporated into the 3rd Division Legere de Cavalerie (DLC). He saw action in the Battle of the Meuse, in May 1940, when the German Army marched through the Ardennes into northern France. The 3rd DLC retreated from Meuse to Mussidan in the Dordogne where the division was demobilised after the Armistice was declared on the 22nd of June, 1940.

Returning to Paris, Tati resumed his civilian profession as a cabaret performer, finding employment at Léon Volterra's Lido de Paris, where he performed his Sporting Impressions from 1940-42.

At the Lido de Paris he met and fell in love with the young Austrian/Czech dancer Herta Schiel, who had fled Vienna with her sister Molly at the time of the Anschluss. In the summer of 1942 Herta gave birth to their daughter, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel. Due to pressure from his sister Nathalie, Tati refused to recognise the child and was forced by Volterra to depart from the Lido at the end of the 1942 season. In 1943, after a short engagement at the A.B.C, where Édith Piaf was headlining, Tati left Paris under a cloud, with his friend Henri Marquet, and they settled in the Village of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre. While residing there they completed the script for L'École des facteurs (The School for Postmen) that would later provide material for his first feature, Jour de fête.

Herta Schiel would remain in Paris throughout the war, where she would make acquaintance with the physician Jacques Weil when he was called upon to treat her sister Molly for the then-incurable tuberculosis (TB). Through Weil, second in command of the Juggler network of the SOE F Section networks, both sisters were recruited into the French Resistance.

In 1944, Tati returned to Paris and, after a brief courtship, married Micheline Winter.

Considered as a possible substitute for Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis, he played the ghost in Sylvie and the Ghost (Sylvie et le fantôme) (Claude Autant-Lara appeared as Sylvie) and also appeared as The Devil in the same film. Here he met Fred Orain, studio director of St. Maurice and the Victorine in Nice.