Philippe, Baron de Rothschild (1902–1988)

Philippe de Rothschild was born in Paris to a famous French Jewish banking family. His parents were Mathilde Sophie Henriette (von Weissweiller) and Baron Henri James de Rothschild, a playwright under the pen name André Pascal. At the start of World War I, 12-year-old Philippe was sent for safety to the family's Château Mouton Rothschild vineyards in the village of Pauillac in the Médoc. There he developed a love of the countryside and the family wine business, which had been theirs since 1853, but had not interested his father and grandfather. As a young man, Rothschild ignored his family's staid traditions to live as a bon vivant. During the 1920s, he took up Grand Prix motor racing using the pseudonym "Georges Philippe" in order to protect his family. Rothschild raced his own Bugatti T35C with moderate success, including winning the 1929 Burgundy Grand Prix and coming fourth in the Grand Prix de Monaco. In 1930, he retired from motor sports. He produced the 1932 film Lac aux dames, the first French "talkie" to receive international recognition, and then devoted his energies to wine-making. One of his innovations was to bottle a second-string vintage as a good low-cost Bordeaux under the name "Mouton Cadet." The product grew so successful that he eventually had to purchase grapes from vineyards throughout the Bordeaux region to meet the demand. Mouton Cadet became the number-one-selling red wine in the world. In 1934, Rothschild married Élisabeth Pelletier de Chambure from a wealthy Catholic family, with whom he had two children. The couple eventually separated. Following Nazi Germany's invasion of France in World War II, he was called up to serve in the French Air Force. However, he was arrested in Algeria by the Vichy government on a flimsy excuse and his French citizenship was revoked. The family vineyard property was seized. After being released from custody in April 1941, Rothschild made his way to England, where he joined the Free French Forces of General Charles de Gaulle, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. When he returned to France as a participant in the Allied liberation, Rothschild learned that, although his daughter Philippine was safe, the Nazis had deported his estranged wife in 1941 to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, where she died. Together with dedicated employees, he began restoring the considerable damage done by the Germans to the Chateau Mouton Rothschild vineyards, and by the early 1950s, they were once again producing wine. He devised the idea of having his labels designed by famous artists. This became a prominent part of the vineyard's image, with labels created by great painters and sculptors such as Jean Cocteau, Leonor Fini, Henry Moore, Marie Laurencin, Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and others. Rothschild also returned to the theatrical world, teaming up with Gaston Bonheur to write a play adapted from the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence. In 1952, Rothschild and Bonheur wrote the script for the film La Demoiselle et son revenant. Rothschild was also a poet, and in 1952 his poem "Vendange" inspired Darius Milhaud to create a three-act ballet for the Paris Opera. Rothschild also translated Elizabethan poetry and the plays of Christopher Fry. He wrote his autobiography late in life with his companion, British theater director Joan Littlewood, published in English as Milady Vine in 1985.