 After a meeting with the actor-manager Charles Dullin, Cuny was persuaded to study drama and he began acting on stage in the late 1930s.In the theatre, Cuny became particularly linked with the works of Paul Claudel (who said of him after a performance of "L'Annonce faite à Marie" in 1944, "I have been waiting for you 20 years").Another literary friend and hero was Antonin Artaud, "whose texts he read with supreme conviction at a time when Artaud was more or less an outcast, a situation reflected in Artaud's "Van Gogh