Jean Renoir sold his father's paintings to pay for his flops
The son of Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir funded his early silent films by selling off canvases he had inherited. The films lost money, but he kept going, and by 1937 he had made La Grande Illusion, the first foreign-language picture ever nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.
Jean Renoir came into the world in Montmartre on 15 September 1894, second son of the painter and his wife Aline. He and his relatives often sat for his father's pictures. The strongest early influence, though, was his nanny Gabrielle Renard, his mother's cousin, who took him to Guignol puppet shows and to his first film while he was still tiny. In his 1974 memoir he credited her with teaching him to hate clichés and see the face behind the mask. Expensive boarding schools followed, and he ran away from them repeatedly.
The First World War redirected him. Serving in the cavalry, he took a bullet in the leg, then flew reconnaissance missions. The wound left a lifelong limp, and convalescing with his leg raised, he watched Chaplin and D.W. Griffith. His father nudged him towards ceramics, but he turned to film, partly, he said, to make his wife Catherine Hessling a star. She had also been his father's last model and led most of his nine silent films, starting with Catherine in 1924.
Sound brought success. Boudu Saved from Drowning, starring Michel Simon, lampooned a bourgeois family trying to reform a tramp, and Toni, shot on location with amateur actors in 1935, later inspired the New Wave. Midway through the decade he aligned himself with the Popular Front, and La Marseillaise reflects its politics. La Grande Illusion, about French prisoners of war escaping in the First World War, starred Jean Gabin and Erich von Stroheim. It won an award at Venice, then was banned in Germany and Italy.
The Rules of the Game followed in 1939, with Renoir himself playing Octave, whose line that everyone has their reasons became a summary of his humane outlook. He later shot The River in India with his nephew Claude, the first colour film made there. He received a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1975, was ranked fourth among directors by Sight and Sound in 2002, and died on 12 February 1979.
Source: Jean Renoir
