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, early, life and/or career:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”; and since then, if we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been, or can be enjoyed by us, without having first cost labour.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“It is not enough that our life is an easy one. We must live on the stretch, retiring to our rest like soldiers on the eve of a battle, looking forward to the strenuous sortie of the morrow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)