Early Life and Career
Renoir was born in the Montmartre district of Paris, France. He was the second son of Aline (née Charigot) and the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. His elder brother was Pierre Renoir, a noted French stage and film actor, while his younger brother Claude Renoir (1901-69) produced some of his films. Renoir was also the uncle of Claude Renoir (1913/14-93), the son of Pierre, a cinematographer who worked with Renoir on several of his films. Renoir's son Alain Renoir, was a professor of comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley and a scholar of medieval English literature.
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 continually ran away.
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. His leg injury left him with a permanent limp, but allowed him to discover the cinema, where he used to recuperate with his leg elevated while watching the films of Charlie Chaplin and others. After the war, Renoir followed his father's suggestion and tried his hand at making ceramics, but he soon set that aside to make films, inspired, in particular, by Erich von Stroheim's work.
In 1924, Renoir directed the first of his nine silent films, most of which starred his first wife, Catherine Hessling, who was also his father's last model. At this stage his films did not produce a return, and Renoir gradually sold paintings inherited from his father to finance them.
Read more about this topic: Jean Renoir
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“We have been told over and over about the importance of bonding to our children. Rarely do we hear about the skill of letting go, or, as one parent said, “that we raise our children to leave us.” Early childhood, as our kids gain skills and eagerly want some distance from us, is a time to build a kind of adult-child balance which permits both of us room.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion (20th century)
“The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper,... in the poet’s life. It is what he has become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince’s gallery.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)