Aurélien-Marie Lugné (27 December 1869 19 June 1940), known by his stage and pen name Lugné-Poe, was a French actor, theatre director, and scenic designer. He founded the landmark Paris theatre company, the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which produced experimental work by French Symbolist writers and painters at the end of the nineteenth century. Like his contemporary, theatre pioneer André Antoine, he gave the French premieres of works by the leading Scandinavian playwrights Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Early career In 1887, at age 17, Lugné-Poe and friend Georges Bourdon created an amateur theatre group called le Cercle des Escholiers, which sought to perform "unpublished or, at the very least, little-known works." As he prepared to audition for the Paris Conservatory, he changed his name from Lugné to "Lugné-Poe" in homage to Edgar Allan Poe. While the Conservatory rejected his audition in fall 1887, they accepted him in fall 1888; days later he joined André Antoine's Théâtre Libre, a subscriber-based Naturalist independent theatre. After appearing in the first play of that season under his own name, Lugné-Poe adopted the stage names "Philippon," "Delorme," and "Leroy" for the duration of his association with Antoine's company. Lugné-Poe continued acting lessons at the Conservatory under the great Comédie-Française star Gustave Worms while appearing in Théâtre Libre's 1888-1889 season and the first half of the next. But tensions grew over the next year as Antoine bullied and blamed his actors, including Lugné-Poe, for weak performances. After their falling out while on tour in Belgium in early 1890, Lugné-Poe concentrated on his Conservatory competition showcases, winning a First-Place certificate for Comedy in early 1890. His obligation to fulfill military service in the fall, however, suspended his theatrical rise. Before his departure, he had already befriended a group of painters known as The Nabis, and publicized their work in a series of articles. Returning from an abbreviated military service in early spring 1891, Lugné-Poe joined Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art, first appearing in Maurice Maeterlinck's L'Intruse. For the next two years, he moved regularly between acting for the Théâtre d'Art and directing for his former company Le Cercle des Escholiers. Lugné-Poe performed in ten plays altogether for Fort, interpreting, most notably, the Maeterlinck rôles of the Old Man in L'Intruse (1891) and the First Blind Man in Les Aveugles (1891), as well as Satan in Jules Bois' Les Noces de Sathan (1892). He, along with Georgette