The Cousteau story was always a family story. The crew of Calypso included Cousteau’s wife and, as they grew up, his sons, and today three generations of Cousteaus work in ocean exploration, filmmaking and conservation. It was also a complicated family, with a tragic early death, a second family kept quiet for years and a public legal dispute between father and son. This page sets out who is who, with the main facts about each person.

Simone Melchior Cousteau, “the Shepherdess”

Simone Melchior came from a French naval family, and she married the young naval officer Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1937, when she was 18.

Her family connections mattered to the birth of scuba. Her father was an executive at Air Liquide, the French industrial gas company, and it was through that connection that Cousteau was introduced to Émile Gagnan, the Air Liquide engineer who helped him develop the demand regulator in 1943. Simone took up diving herself with the early Aqua-Lung and is often described as the first woman scuba diver, although she never sought attention for it.

Simone’s greatest contribution was keeping Calypso running. She lived aboard the ship for decades, longer than almost anyone else on the crew, and the crew called her la Bergère, “the Shepherdess”, for the way she looked after them. She reportedly sold family jewellery in the early days to help pay for fuel and supplies. She appeared only occasionally on camera, preferring to stay in the background, but crew members’ accounts make clear that the ship’s life revolved around her. She died of cancer in December 1990.

Growing up a Cousteau

For Jean-Michel and Philippe, childhood was shaped by the sea and by their father’s long absences.

The boys were born just before and during the Second World War, when Cousteau was a naval officer based at Toulon and spending every spare hour experimenting with diving equipment along the coast. They learned to swim and dive almost as soon as they could walk, and both were using the Aqua-Lung while still young children, which made them among the first children anywhere to dive with compressed air. Family photographs from the 1940s show them in tiny masks and tanks, an image that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

As Calypso took Cousteau further afield in the 1950s, the boys were sent to boarding school and saw their father less. Simone often sailed with the ship, so family life split between the vessel and school. Both sons later joined the expeditions as adults, and much of the family’s relationship was played out on the ship and on film. Several biographers have pointed out that the Cousteau children shared their father with the whole world, which brought them extraordinary opportunities and also a great deal of strain.

I can relate to the pull of a project that takes over your life. Building and running my own coral farm took years of evenings, weekends and money, and anything that consumes you that completely affects the people around you. Cousteau’s project was on a scale few people ever attempt, and his family lived with the consequences.

Philippe Cousteau (1940–1979)

Philippe, the younger son, was the one most people expected to take over his father’s work.

He became a diver as a boy, trained in filmmaking and photography, and was a central figure in The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, appearing on screen and working as a producer and cameraman. He co-wrote The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea with his father and made his own films. He was also a keen pilot. On 28 June 1979, the PBY Catalina flying boat he was piloting flipped while landing on the Tagus River near Lisbon, and he was killed. He was 38. His death devastated his father, and many who knew the family said the elder Cousteau never fully recovered.

Philippe was married to Janice Sullivan, known as Jan Cousteau. Their daughter Alexandra was born in 1976, and their son, Philippe Cousteau Jr., was born in 1980, months after his father’s death.

Jean-Michel Cousteau

Jean-Michel, the elder son, was born in 1938 and was put into the water at a very young age; family accounts say he was diving with an Aqua-Lung as a small boy.

He trained as an architect but spent most of his career working with his father, on expeditions, in the Cousteau Society and on film projects. After Philippe’s death he took on a larger role, but his relationship with his father became strained, especially after the revelation of Cousteau’s second family. In 1996, the elder Cousteau took him to court over the use of the family name for a resort in Fiji, and won a ruling limiting how Jean-Michel could use it commercially. After his father’s death, Jean-Michel founded Ocean Futures Society in 1999 and continued to make documentaries and campaign for ocean protection. The resort in Fiji still bears his name; see our page on the Cousteau name in Fiji.

Francine Triplet and the second family

Francine Triplet was a former flight attendant who became Cousteau’s companion while he was still married to Simone.

The couple had two children: Diane, born in 1980, and Pierre-Yves, born in 1982. Their existence was not widely known for many years. Cousteau married Francine in 1991, six months after Simone’s death. After he died in 1997, Francine became the head of the Cousteau Society and of its French counterpart, the Équipe Cousteau, and she has been involved in long-running disputes over the Cousteau name, the films and the fate of Calypso. Pierre-Yves Cousteau has worked in marine conservation and diving, and founded an initiative called Cousteau Divers that encourages recreational divers to contribute to science.

The family’s divisions became very public, especially between Francine’s side and Jean-Michel’s. Our page on how Jacques Cousteau died covers how those tensions played out in his last years.

The grandchildren: Fabien, Céline, Alexandra and Philippe Jr.

The third generation of Cousteaus has continued the family’s work in different ways.

Fabien Cousteau, Jean-Michel’s son, is the best known. In 2014 he led Mission 31, living for 31 days in the Aquarius undersea research station in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary off Key Largo, a tribute to his grandfather’s Conshelf II experiment in the Red Sea; see Mission 31. Key Largo is one of my own dive destinations, and knowing that Aquarius sits just offshore of those reefs makes the story feel close to home. His sister Céline Cousteau has worked on documentaries and expeditions, with a particular interest in South America and the Amazon.

Alexandra Cousteau and Philippe Cousteau Jr., Philippe’s children, founded EarthEcho International in 2000 with their mother, an organisation that encourages young people to get involved in protecting water and the ocean. Philippe Jr. has hosted television series on the ocean and wildlife, and Alexandra has worked widely on water and ocean policy, including campaigns on freshwater, rivers and the health of coastal waters.

A family business of the sea

For all its disputes, the Cousteau family has done something few families manage: three generations devoted to the same cause.

Many of the organisations they run today compete with each other for the family name and the public’s attention, and it can be confusing to work out which Cousteau is behind which project. But the common thread is the ocean. The family that taught the world to dive is still, more than eighty years after the first Aqua-Lung, working to get people into the water and to protect what they find there. For the man at the centre of it all, see our main Jacques Cousteau biography, and for his early years before marriage and children, see young Jacques Cousteau.

I think there is a lesson in the family’s history for anyone who builds something around a passion. The work outlived the founder because the next generations shared the passion, not because they agreed on everything. Simone kept the ship running while Jacques made the films. Philippe and Jean-Michel learned to dive before they learned much else. Fabien and his cousins grew up with the ocean as the family business. Whatever the disagreements over names and money, that shared love of the sea is what has kept the Cousteau name attached to ocean exploration for so long.