In 1943, he was captured by Vichy France loyalists on the Mekong River and was subjected to severe hardship and forced labour. During the war he was a supporter of Charles de Gaulle.īoulle served as a secret agent under the name Peter John Rule and helped the resistance movement in China, Burma, and French Indochina. After German troops occupied France, he joined the Free French Mission in Singapore. Boulle would later meet her after the war, and they enjoyed a platonic friendship.Īt the outbreak of World War II, Boulle enlisted with the French army in Indochina. During World War II she and her husband escaped into Malaya, but one of her children died in the process.

She later chose to return to her husband, an official in French Indochina. She was to become the love of his life, to whom he would write tender love letters. While there he met a Frenchwoman who was separated from her husband.

From 1936 to 1939, he worked as a technician on British rubber plantations in Malaya. He studied at the prestigious École supérieure d'électricité ( Supélec) where he received an engineer's degree in 1933. His science-fiction novel Planet of the Apes, in which intelligent apes gain mastery over humans, was adapted into a series of nine award-winning films that spawned magazine and TV versions and popular themed toys.īorn in Avignon, France, Pierre Boulle was baptised and raised as a Catholic, although later in life he became an agnostic. The film, named The Bridge on the River Kwai, by David Lean won seven Oscars, and Boulle was credited with writing the screenplay, because its two actual screenwriters had been blacklisted. He used these experiences in The Bridge over the River Kwai, about the notorious Death Railway, which became an international bestseller. īoulle was an engineer serving as a secret agent with the Free French in Singapore, when he was captured and subjected to two years' forced labour. He is best known for two works, The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952) and Planet of the Apes (1963), that were both made into award-winning films. Pierre François Marie Louis Boulle (20 February 1912 – 30 January 1994) was a French author.

De Apenplaneet by Pierre Boulle