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Renoir was the second son of Aline Victorine Charigot and one of the world's most famous painters, Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
When he was a child, his family moved to the south of France. He and the rest of the Renoir family would be the subject of many of his father's paintings. As a young man, his father's financial success ensured that Jean was educated at the best of schools. However, his education was interrupted when World War I broke out and he joined the army, serving first as a cavalryman and later as a pilot. He was injured in action, which left him with a permanent limp. After the War, Jean Renoir worked as a ceramic artist but soon became fascinated by the developments in motion pictures, particularly by the works of D. W. Griffith and Charles Chaplin, who he knew for several years only by his French name, Charlot.
In 1925, he directed the first of several silent films, many of which starred his first wife, Catherine Hessling. Associated with the Popular Front in the mid thirties, several films such as Le Crime de Monsieur Lange reflected the movement's politics. In 1937 he directed what many see as his first masterpiece, " La Grande Illusion." The film was banned as French propaganda in Germany by senior Nazi leader, Joseph Goebbels, and eventually by Mussolini in ItalyThe Italian Republic or Italy ( Italian: Italia is a country in the south of Europe, consisting mainly of a boot-shaped peninsula together with two large islands in the Mediterranean Sea: Sicily and Sardinia. To the north, where it borders France, Switzer after it won the "Best Artistic Ensemble" award at the Venice Film FestivalThe Venice Film Festival Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica takes place every year in late August/early September on the Lido di Venezia in the historic Palazzo del Cinema on the Lungomare Marconi, in Venice, Italy. Its main award is the "Leone. This was followed by another cinematic success: "La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast)," a film based on an Emile Zola novel and starring the immensely popular Jean GabinJean Gabin ( May 17, 1904 November 15, 1976) was a major French actor and war hero. Born Jean-Alexis Moncorg in a hospital in Paris, France, he grew up in the family home in the village of Meriel in the Val-d'Oise departement about 22 miles (35 kilometers.
In 1939 Renoir directed "La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game)," a film about upper-class French society just before the start of World War II. Renoir also appears in the film as one of the main characters. The film was initially judged to be too gloomy and was greeted with derision by a Parisian crowd on its premiere. The French government duly banned it, but in later decades it came to be recognized as one of the greatest films of all-timeThis is a partial list of films that have been regarded as the greatest ever . The objective is not to resolve the question of the greatest-ever movie — the one thing that film commentators do agree on is that it is impossible to have a single answer to t.
When World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough came, the 45-year-old Renoir joined the Film Service of the French army. With the German invasion and Occupation in 1941, he fled France to the safety of the United StatesThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in where he worked in the film industry in Hollywood, CaliforniaFor other uses, see Hollywood (disambiguation Hollywood is a district of the City of Los Angeles, California, U. that runs from about Vermont Avenue on the east to just beyond Laurel Canyon Boulevard above Sunset and Crescent Heights Boulevards on the wes. In 1943, he produced and directed an anti-Nazi propaganda film: "This Land Is Mine," starring Maureen O'Hara and Charles Laughton. Two years later he made "The Southerner," a film regarded as his best work in America and one for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Directing.
In 1962, Jean Renoir wrote a biography titled: Renoir, My Father. In 1975 he received an Academy Award for his lifetime contribution to the motion picture industry and that same year a retrospective of his work was shown at the National Film Theatre in London, England. In 1977, the government of France awarded him with the Legion of Honor. His life story titled My Life and My Films was published in 1974. In it, he talks about the profound influence of Gabrielle Renard, the woman seen here in the portrait by his father. Renard was a cousin of his mother and the family nanny who helped raised Jean from birth and who introduced him to the world of the cinema.
Jean Renoir died in Beverly Hills, California on February 12, 1979. His body was returned to France to be interred beside his family in the Essoyes Cemetery, in Essoyes , Aube, France.
Jean Renoir has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6212 Hollywood Blvd.