Bertrand Castelli

Bertrand Castelli (December 3, 1929, Salon-de-Provence – August 1, 2008) was a French producer, director, lighting designer, choreographer, painter and writer best known as the executive producer of many productions of the rock musical Hair in partnership with the show's main producers Michael Butler and Annie Fargue. Castelli was instrumental in helping the show reach Broadway and would later lead the effort to introduce Hair to a worldwide theatre audience.

Beginning as an innovative lighting designer for ballet and opera, Castelli tried screenwriting, playwriting, choreographing and directing before becoming a producer of Hair in New York and then masterminding its many international productions. In later years, he became the artist in residence of a Mexican resort Belmond Maroma, where he created paintings for every room in the resort.

Biography Castelli was born in Salon-de-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, France, of Corsican heritage. During World War II, he got a job operating the projector at a cinema. Castelli and his friends began to paint and to write and perform plays, operas and ballets to cast aside the gloom of Nazi-occupied Paris. At the age of 17, after the war, he toured Germany operating the lights for a small circus, learning theatre arts and developing innovative lighting techniques.

Early career Castelli began his professional artistic career in France working for ballet and opera companies in Paris, starting with lighting design. To finance his ambitions to create a serious ballet, at the age of 21 he first created a short ballet called 'Le colleur d'affiches' in which he costumed dancers as large advertising posters, which came to life advertising each product through a three-minute solo. He boldly pitched the unique concept to large companies such as Perrier, Cartier, Christian Dior and Cointreau. The companies were intrigued and provided financing. He then was able to stage a first-class production of his ballet Les Algues, composed by Guy Bernard, and hired the ballerina Janine Charrat to choreograph and dance the lead role. He traveled in Paris art circles and rubbed elbows with Pablo Picasso, Marcel Marceau and Jean Cocteau. According to his daughter, he once worked as Picasso's assistant, and he was an occasional lover of Françoise Gilot, the mother of two of Picasso's children.

At the age of 24, he moved to New York and then on to Hollywood, where MGM offered him a contract. He wrote numerous plays, including The Umbrella which was produced both on Broadway and in London, The Men's Room and A Frenchman in New York, the last of which was turned into a film. Shortly after Hair opened on Broadway in 1968, Butler gave Castelli the job of leading the many foreign language productions of the show. Castelli made the decision to translate Hair into the local language of each country at a time when Broadway shows were always done in English.

During the last 15 years of his life, Castelli lived mostly in the Yucatán, Mexico, where he was artist in residence at the Maroma Resort and Spa in Riviera Maya, not far from Cancún. He spent his retirement writing and painting abstract, Spanish-influenced, colorful artworks whose subject was often dancers and human movement, surrounded in retirement by his artistic young friends. He created a painting for every room in the resort. The New York Times described him as "a friend of the famous and not-so-famous, a cultivator of people, an avid pot smoker and devoted sensualist". His friend Michael Butler described him as a "crazy showman... the guy with the business suit and beads".

Castelli died at the age of 78 in a hospital near the resort after being hit by a speedboat during his daily swim.