Trivia

His novel "Man's Fate" was once scheduled to be filmed by MGM in a production directed by Fred Zinnemann, but was abruptly canceled.

He was the French Minister of Cultural Affairs from 1/8/59-6/20/69.

His daughter Florence assisted Truffaut on Jules and Jim and Alain Resnais on a number of films, marrying the latter director in 1969, a year after the tensions between her father and the New Wave over Henri Langlois.

Malraux was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature on 32 occasions. He was an annual contender for the prize in the 1950s and 1960s, but was never awarded. In 1969 he was the main candidate considered for the prize along with Samuel Beckett. His candidacy was supported by some members of the Nobel committee, but was rejected for political reasons by another member, and the Swedish Academy ultimately decided that Beckett should be awarded.

In recognition of his contributions to French culture, his ashes were moved to the Panthéon in Paris during 1996, on the twentieth anniversary of his death.

By the age of twenty, Malraux was reading the work of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who was to remain a major influence on him for the rest of his life. Malraux was especially impressed with Nietzsche's theory of a world in continuous turmoil and his statement "that the individual himself is still the most recent creation" who was completely responsible for all of his actions. Most of all, Malraux embraced Nietzsche's theory of the Übermensch, the heroic, exalted man who would create great works of art and whose will would allow him to triumph over anything.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Malraux joined the French Army. He was captured in 1940 during the Battle of France but escaped and later joined the French Resistance.

He was appointed by President Charles de Gaulle as information minister (1945-46) and subsequently as France's first cultural affairs minister during de Gaulle's presidency (1959-1969).

On 23 May 1961, André Malraux's two sons, Gauthier and Vincent, were killed in a car accident.

One of the primary "feeder" schools of the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in London is named in honour of André Malraux.

Malraux's novel La Condition Humaine (Man's Fate) (1933) won the Prix Goncourt.

From his childhood, associates noticed that André had marked nervousness and motor and vocal tics. The recent biographer Olivier Todd, who published a book on Malraux in 2005, suggests that he had Tourette syndrome, although that has not been confirmed.

His father, a stockbroker, committed suicide in 1930 after the international crash of the stock market and onset of the Great Depression.

Malraux was an outspoken supporter of the Bangladesh liberation movement during the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh and despite his age seriously considered joining the struggle. When Indira Gandhi came to Paris in November 1971, there was extensive discussion between them about the situation in Bangladesh.

In 1944, he was captured by the Gestapo. André's half-brother, Claude, a Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent, was also captured by the Germans, and executed at Gross-Rosen concentration camp in 1944.