French clowning teacher, born in 1943 in occupied Paris, died on February 9th 2026, aged 82. His father, a doctor, named him Philippe after General Pétain. His paternal grandfather was a pharmacist.
Gaulier joined Jacques Lecoq's theatre school in Paris, where he spent two years as a student before discovering that his true metier was clowning rather than tragedy (audiences laughed every time he played it straight). He stayed on to teach at Lecoq's school for a further ten years, though he came to disagree with Lecoq's emphasis on mime-movement and technique, preferring lightness, pleasure and play. After leaving Lecoq he toured for a decade in a two-hander called "Les Assiettes", which involved smashing 200 plates onstage every night.
In 1980 he set up his own school at Étampes, near Paris. He ran it for 42 years in various locations, and it became world-famous. About 90 students attended each year, paying €2,300 a term for a two-year course. He never took money from the French government.
Gaulier's approach, sometimes called la via negativa by other clowning masters, relied on a barrage of insults — he preferred to call it torment. He held that insults aided progress: being told you were good made you stop trying, whereas repeated failure forced you to dig deep. The cardinal sin was to be boring.
He taught two particular disciplines: le jeu (the game) and le buffon (the buffoon). In le jeu, students learned to rediscover childlike play — musical chairs, grandmother's footsteps, tag — shedding their egos to find their own unique, secret inner absurdity. They wore red noses for a whole day to find their inner idiot. In le buffon, clowns mocked other actors and manipulated audiences into laughing at themselves.
His school also offered courses in neutral mask, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Chekhov.
Gaulier was a self-described anarchist and a participant in the May 1968 protests in Paris, where he built street barricades and threw stones at the police. During national service he was frequently locked up for not wearing his beret straight.
Sacha Baron Cohen, Roberto Begnini, Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson all attended his school. Hillary Clinton once visited to interview him. Dozens of theatre companies were inspired by his teaching, most famously the Théâtre de Complicité.
The secret of happiness is total disregard of everybody.