monstre sacré

plural monstres sacrés

1. A striking, unusual public figure; an eccentric celebrity.

   Ken Russell's BBC film (with Vivian Pickles) and Kenneth MacMillan's Isadora ballet portrayed her as a grotesque monstre sacre.

   2002 January 27, Jann Parry, The Observer

   2 more examples

   […] Picasso changed, or was changed, from a capital painter, known as such a painter should be known, into a monstre sacré, a holy cow surrounded with an enormous, self-perpetuating, inescapable, and generally irrelevant notoriety.

   1994 [1976], Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography, London: Harvill, page 372

   They call him the last monstre sacré (an expression coined by Jean Cocteau to describe Sarah Bernhardt), adding that “attacking Depardieu is attacking art.[…]”

   2023 December 31, Agnès Poirier, “Evoking genius to defend ‘dark stars’ like Gérard Depardieu looks very French – and it is”, in The Observer, →ISSN