Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 1, 1994 TAG: 9402010146
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C2 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PARIS LENGTH: Medium
Boulle died Sunday night, his associates said Monday. No cause of death was released.
Born Feb. 20, 1912, in Avignon, Boulle obtained an engineering degree at the Ecole Superieur d'Electricite and went to work at a rubber plantation in Malaysia.
In 1939, Boulle joined the French army in Indochina and later the French Resistance in Malaysia before he was captured by the Japanese. His experience as a forced laborer before his escape in 1944 led him to write numerous books.
In "Bridge on the River Kwai," which was made into a 1957 movie starring William Holden and Sir Alec Guinness, Allied prisoners of war at a Japanese camp in Southeast Asia build a bridge for their captors.
A team of Allied saboteurs tries to blow up the bridge and is thwarted by the British commander of the POWs. But the commander, played by Guinness, realizes his error and, mortally wounded, falls atop the detonator to blast the bridge apart.
The book was a dramatization of the plight of Allied POWs forced to build a 258-mile railway, which passed over the bridge. Thousands of prisoners died during construction of the line, which became known as the Death Railway.
Boulle's futuristic book "Planet of the Apes," the story of a world where talking apes have power over man, was made into a movie in 1968 starring Charlton Heston.
Boulle was a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, received a War Cross from World War II and a Medal of the Resistance.
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.