The theatre director and actor Nicolas Bataille was never really a star in France — he was perhaps better known in Japan, at least for a while — but his place in the history books is assured. His career, which spanned more than six decades, is synonymous with La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Primadonna, or Soprano), the Eugène Ionesco play that he premiered in May 1950, and of which his production has enjoyed an unbroken run in the Théâtre de la Huchette from February 1957 to the present day.

In its record-breaking 51-and-counting years, the play has drawn about a million and a half spectators — not bad in a cockpit of a venue with a capacity of only 92. Today, in a corner of Paris dominated by cheap, mainly Greek eateries and student bookstores, it is a monument to the early days of absurdist theatre and a tourist attraction. Over the years, Nicolas Bataille would appear and reappear as Monsieur Martin, a role he last played in June 2007, and that he created back in 1950.

He was born Roger Bataille in 1926. His father was an architect and his mother a housewife. He contracted his passion for theatre as a child and, on completing his schooling, attended the courses given by René Simon and Solange Sicard. It was with the latter that he met the poet and scriptwriter Jacques Prévert. The first of the many encounters that would play such an important role throughout his career, this led to him getting work as an extra in that monument of French cinema, Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis in 1945.

His career as a theatrical director began in 1948, when with Akakia Viala he put on Une saison en enfer, based on Rimbaud’s poem, for which they won an award for young avant-garde theatre. For reasons that have not been fully elucidated, in 1949 they claimed to have discovered unpublished verses by Rimbaud, and these were published in Combat that May and published by Mercure de France under the title La Chasse Spirituelle. The bestselling texts were hailed by critics, with the exception of André Breton, who sensed that they were inauthentic. He was right: this “undiscovered Rimbaud” was the work of Bataille and Viala. The literary storm bespattered many a critical reputation.

Fortunately for Bataille’s career, a genuine literary novelty also arrived that year, in the form of L’Anglais sans peine (English without Effort), a surprising first play by a Franco-Romanian unknown, Eugène Ionesco, that Bataille was given by an assistant, Monica Levinesco. He decided to put it on. According to theatre legend, its new title came about when an actor fluffed his lines in rehearsal, replacing “institutrice blonde” with “cantatrice chauve”. Costumes were donated by the director Claude Autant-Lara from his film Occupe-toi d’Amélie, and an antiques dealer provided Second Empire furniture. The première, at another tiny theatre, Les Noctambules, was attended by Raymond Queneau, Breton, Philippe Soupault and Arthur Adamov.

It was a critical and public failure. However, Ionesco’s reputation was rising, as in the following years La Leçon and Les Chaises and the emerging “theatre of the absurd” (Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was premiered in Paris in 1953, and there were the early plays of Adamov) persuaded critics to change their mind. Bataille was given a second chance in 1957, helped once again by a film director — the 25-year-old Louis Malle, for whom he had just played a brasserie customer in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, put up the production money.

Since then, about hundred actors have played the six characters in this play whose absurd dialogues between the Martins and the Smiths were inspired by the disjointed absurdity of English phrasebooks. Ionesco himself continued to see the play, later paired with his La Leçon, up to his death in 1994 (he also acted in Bataille’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed a few years after La Cantatrice).

Bataille’s career embraced more than 40 theatre productions in France, as well as numerous bit parts in films, not least Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) and Malle’s Zazie dans le métro (1960). His success with La Cantatrice chauve took him to Japan, where he later stayed from 1968 to 1971. He was a regular presence on stage and television and was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun. In France, he courted controversy with a production of de Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir in 1964. This production of the sulphurous “Divine Marquis”, a sure target for censorship in pre-1968 France, was closed down after a handful of performances. Bataille and his partner, Jacques Legré, were, as the latter has recalled, disappointed not to be put in prison. Another bold production featured theatre pieces by the Italian Futurist Marinetti. And, on a lighter note, Bataille showed his eclecticism by directing numerous musicals, starting with Twist Appeal in 1962, and an Offenbach piece in the early 1990s.

Nicolas Bataille, actor and theatre director, was born on March 14, 1926. He died on October 28, 2008, aged 82