Jean Renoir (; 15 September 1894 – 12 February 1979) was a French filmmaker, actor, producer and author. His La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. In 2002, he was ranked fourth on the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of the greatest directors. Among numerous honours accrued during his lifetime, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975. Renoir was the son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the uncle of the cinematographer Claude Renoir. With Claude, he made The River (1951), the first color film shot in India. A lifelong lover of theater, Renoir turned to the stage for The Golden Coach (1952) and French Cancan (1955). He was one of the first filmmakers to be known as an auteur; the critic Penelope Gilliatt said a Renoir shot could be identified "in a thousand miles of film."
Pauline Kael wrote that "At his greatest, Jean Renoir expresses the beauty in our common humanity—the desires and hopes, the absurdities and follies, that we all, to one degree or another, share." Per The New York Times: "The style that ran through Mr. Renoir's films — a mixture of tenderness, irony and Gallic insouciance‐was caught in a famous line from his 1939 masterpiece, The Rules of the Game. It was spoken by Octave, played by the director himself: 'You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.'"
Early life
Renoir was born in the Montmartre district of Paris, France. He was the second son of Aline (née Charigot) Renoir and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the Impressionist painter. His elder brother was Pierre Renoir, a French stage and film actor, and his younger brother Claude Renoir (1901–1969) had a brief career in the film industry, mostly assisting on a few of Jean's films. Jean Renoir was also the uncle of Claude Renoir (1913–1993), the son of Pierre, a cinematographer who worked with Jean Renoir on several of his films. He recalls that "I discovered Alexandre Dumas when I was about ten. I am still discovering him."
Renoir was largely raised by Gabrielle Renard, his nanny and his mother's cousin, with whom he developed a strong bond. Shortly before his birth, she had come to live with the Renoir family.My Life and My Films, p. 16 She introduced the young boy to the Guignol puppet shows in Montmartre, which influenced his later film career. He wrote in his 1974 memoirs My Life and My Films, "She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes. She taught me to detest the cliché."My Life and My Films, pp. 29, 282 Gabrielle was also fascinated by the new early motion pictures, and when Renoir was only a few years old she took him to see his first film.
As a child, Renoir moved to the south of France with his family. He and the rest of the Renoir family were the subjects of many of his father's paintings. His father's financial success ensured that the young Renoir was educated at fashionable boarding schools, from which, as he later wrote, he frequently ran away.Renoir, Jean. Renoir My Father, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962, pp. 417–419; 425–429
At the outbreak of World War I, Renoir was serving in the French cavalry. Later, after receiving a bullet in his leg, he served as a reconnaissance pilot.Durgnat, Raymond. Jean Renoir, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974, pp. 27–28 His leg injury left him with a permanent limp, but allowed him to develop his interest in the cinema, since he recuperated with his leg elevated while watching films, including the works of Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith and others.Renoir, Jean. My Life and My Films, New York: Atheneum, 1974, pp. 40–43Renoir My Father, pp. 417–19. After the war, Renoir followed his father's suggestion and tried making ceramic art, but he soon set that aside to make films in the attempt, he would later claim, to make his wife, Hessling, a star.Pérez, G: The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium, p.193. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. He was particularly inspired by Erich von Stroheim's work.My Life and My Films, pp. 47–48.Renoir, Jean. "Memories", Le Point XVIII, December 1938. Reprinted in Bazin, Andre. Jean Renoir, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973, pp. 151–152
Career Early years In 1924, Renoir directed Une Vie Sans Joie or Catherine, the first of his nine silent films, most of which starred his first wife, Catherine Hessling, who was also his father's last model.Durgnat, p. 29. The name of the film was Une Vie Sans Joie or Catherine. At this stage, his films did not produce a return. Renoir gradually sold paintings inherited from his father to finance them.My Life and My Films, pp. 81–85 Hessling also starred in Nana shot in 1926 and the 1927 silent futuristic fantasy film Charleston Parade (Sur un air de Charleston) with the African American mime artist Johnny Hudgins.
International success in the 1930s During the 1930s Renoir enjoyed great success as a filmmaker. In 1931 he directed his first sound films, On purge bébé (Baby's Laxative) and La Chienne (The Bitch).Durgnat, pp. 64, 68 The following year he made Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux), a farcical sendup of the pretensions of a middle-class bookseller and his family, who meet with comic, and ultimately disastrous, results when they attempt to reform a vagrant played by Michel Simon.Durgnat, pp. 85–87 In 1934, he filmed an adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857). His 1935 film Toni, shot on locations with a nonprofessional cast, was later an influence on the French New Wave.
By the middle of the decade, Renoir was associated with the Popular Front. Several of his films, such as The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, 1935), Life Belongs to Us (1936) and (1938), reflect the movement's politics.My Life and My Films, pp. 124–127Durgnat, pp. 108–131
In 1937, he made La Grande Illusion, one of his best-known films, starring Erich von Stroheim and Jean Gabin. A film on the theme of brotherhood, relating a series of escape attempts by French POWs during World War I, it was enormously successful. It was banned in Germany, and later in Italy, after having won the Best Artistic Ensemble award at the Venice Film Festival.Bazin, Andre. Jean Renoir, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973, pp. 56–66 It was the first foreign language film to receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 1938, the Nazis disrupted a showing of La Grande Illusion. Renoir reflected, "This is a story that fills me with real pride."
He followed it with The Human Beast () (1938), a film noir and tragedy based on the novel by Émile Zola and starring Gabin and Simone Simon. It too was a success.Durgnat, pp. 172–184
In 1939, able to co-finance his own films,Durgnat, p. 185. Renoir made The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu), a satire on contemporary French society with an ensemble cast.Gilliatt, Penelope. Jean Renoir: Essays, Conversations, Reviews, New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1975, p. 59 Renoir played the character Octave, who serves to connect characters from different social strata.Renoir, Jean. An Interview: Jean Renoir, Copenhagen: Green Integer Books, 1998, p. 67 The film was his greatest commercial failure,Volk, Carol. Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays and Remarks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 236 met with derision by Parisian audiences at its premiere. He extensively reedited the work, but without success at the time.Durgnat, pp. 189–190
A few weeks after the outbreak of World War II, the film was banned by the government. Renoir was a known pacifist and supporter of the French Communist Party, which made him suspect in the tense weeks before the war began. The ban was lifted briefly in 1940, but after the fall of France that June, it was banned again.Durgnant, 191 Subsequently, the original negative of the film was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid. It was not until the 1950s that French film enthusiasts Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand, with Renoir's cooperation, reconstructed a near-complete print of the film.Faulkner, Christopher, Jean Renoir, a guide to references and resources, Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall & Company, 1979, p. 34Gilliatt, p. 60 Since that time, The Rules of the Game has been reappraised and has frequently appeared near the top of critics' polls of the best films ever made.
A week after the disastrous premiere of The Rules of the Game in July 1939, Renoir went to Rome with Karl Koch and Dido Freire, subsequently his second wife, to work on the script for a film version of Tosca.Durgnat, p. 213.David Thompson and Lorraine LoBianco (ed.) Jean Renoir: Letters, London: Faber & Faber, 1994, p. 61 At the age of 45, he became a lieutenant in the French Army Film Service. He was sent back to Italy, to teach film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and resume work on Tosca.My Life and My Films, pp. 175–176Jean Renoir: Letters, pp. 62–65. The French government hoped this cultural exchange would help maintain friendly relations with Italy, which had not yet entered the war.Thompson and LoBianco, p. 65 He abandoned the project to return to France and make himself available for military service in August 1939.Durgnat, p. 213My Life and My Films, p. 177Jean Renoir: Letters, pp. 61, 64
Hollywood After Germany invaded France in May 1940, Renoir fled to the United States with Dido Freire.Durgnat, p. 222.Thompson and LoBianco, p. 87 "Dido and I travelled by sea from Marseille to Algeria, Morocco and Lisbon... At Lisbon we got places on an American ship, and I was delighted to find myself sharing a cabin with none other than the writer Saint-Exupéry." In Hollywood, Renoir had difficulty finding projects that suited him.Volk, pp. 10–30 His first American film, Swamp Water (1941), was a drama starring Dana Andrews and Walter Brennan. His second, The Amazing Mrs. Holliday, suffered numerous production difficulties, and Renoir was eventually replaced as the credited director by the film's producer, Bruce Manning.DIMOUT ON COAST AFFECTS FILMING: New York Times 7 Aug 1942: 13. He co-produced and directed an anti-Nazi film set in France, This Land Is Mine (1943), starring Maureen O'Hara and Charles Laughton, as well as a short documentary, Salute to France, co-directed with Garson Kanin.Durgnat, pp. 234–236.Thompson and LoBianco, p. 183 Renoir's greatest American success came in 1945, when he made The Southerner (1945) and was nominated for an Academy Award for Directing.Durgnat, p. 244Bazin, p. 103
Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) is an adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel, Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, starring Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith.Thompson and LoBianco, pp. 165–169.Durgnat, p. 252. His The Woman on the Beach (1947), starring Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan, was heavily reshot and reedited after it fared poorly among preview audiences in California.Durgnat, p. 261. Both films were poorly received; they were the last films Renoir made in America.Durgnat, p. 259.Volk, p. 24.My Life and My Films, p. 247 At this time, Renoir became a naturalized citizen of the United States.Thompson and LoBianco, pp. 207, 270
Post-Hollywood In 1949 Renoir traveled to India to shoot The River (1951), his first color film.Durgnat, pp. 273–274 Based on the novel of the same name by Rumer Godden, the film is both a meditation on human beings' relationship with nature and a coming of age story of three young girls in colonial India.Durgnat, pp. 273, 275–276 The film won the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.Durgnat, p. 284