Lucien Lemoine

Lucien Lemoine (December 19, 1923 – January 13, 2010) was a Haitian-Senegalese stage director, actor, poet, and radio host. Born in Haiti, he fled the dictatorship of François Duvalier and settled in Senegal, where he became a citizen.

He was married to the actress and writer Jacqueline Scott-Lemoine.

Early life and exile in Paris Lucien Lemoine was born in 1923 in Jacmel, Haiti. He began his theater career in his home country. In the early 1960s, he emigrated to Paris, where he met his future wife, actress Jacqueline Scott. The couple married on July 15, 1964, at the Haitian Embassy in Paris, with the writer Aimé Césaire as their witness.

Theater career in Europe and Africa In 1966, Lucien Lemoine and Jacqueline Scott-Lemoine traveled to Senegal with Jean-Marie Serreau's theater troupe, of which they were both members, to perform at the first World Festival of Black Arts. Lemoine was profoundly marked by this experience as an actor, as he relates in his book Douta Seck ou La tragédie du roi Christophe. He also appeared in the 1972 film The Black Decameron. He worked as a journalist at Radiodiffusion Télévision Sénégalaise, chronicling the trajectory of African theater, where he notably hosted the program La voix des poètes with his wife for 12 years, making the couple well known among the general public. They also taught journalism students at the (CESTI), and Lemoine created theater workshops in partnership with the Daniel Sorano National Theater's director Ousmane Diakhaté.

Death and legacy Lemoine worked closely throughout his professional career with his wife, linking them inextricably. On his death in 2010, in Dakar, the poet Amadou Lamine Sall honored him by declaring, "Far, far in the future, our children and grandchildren will discover a woman and a man who occupied the only human spaces that are not for sale but must be conquered: the mind and the thought." Lemoine-Scott died a year after his death.