Gaston leroux author biography page

French mystery novelist, playwright, journalist, and a prolific feuilletonist. Leroux is best known for his Le Fantôme de l'opéra (1910, The Phantom of the Opera), in which a criminally insane recluse haunts a Paris opera house, and abducts a young and beautiful singer to his cellar retreat.

Gaston Leroux - Wikipedia

The novel has been a source for several films and stage adaptations, including Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version, first produced in 1987.

"The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge.

Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade." (from The Phantom of the Gaston Leroux - Short Stories and Classic Literature WUJO