60 Fun Facts About Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir's father, who often painted him as a child, was a leading figure of which art movement?

Impressionism. Pierre-Auguste Renoir so loved painting his son's long golden hair that he kept it uncut until Jean was seven, to the boy's embarrassment.

In which Paris district was Jean Renoir born in 1894?

Montmartre. As a small boy he was taken to Guignol, France's answer to Punch and Judy, and the puppet shows left a lasting mark on his films.

Which US president said everyone who believes in democracy should see Renoir's La Grande Illusion?

Franklin D. Roosevelt. He saw it at a White House screening arranged for his wife Eleanor's birthday, and the subtitled French film went on to play in New York for months.

Who took the young Jean Renoir to puppet shows and to his first film?

Gabrielle Renard, his nanny, was his mother's young cousin, hired just before his birth. He closed his memoirs with the cry of his childhood: 'Wait for me, Gabrielle.'

What role did Renoir take on in World War I after being wounded in the leg?

Reconnaissance pilot. He photographed German troop movements until a rough landing aggravated his leg wound and sent him back to Paris, where he passed the time in the cinemas, catching up on Chaplin's films.

What craft did Jean Renoir take up after World War I, at his father's suggestion?

Ceramics. Albert Barnes, the American collector who amassed his father's canvases, also acquired dozens of Jean's pots, which the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia holds.

Renoir claimed he took up filmmaking to make a star of whom?

His first wife, Catherine Hessling, had been his father's last model. She later insisted she had never wanted to be a film star at all.

Which silent-era director, the young Renoir's idol, later played the German commandant in La Grande Illusion?

Erich von Stroheim. He devised the commandant's rigid neck brace himself, and Renoir recalled that the Vienna-born star had to learn his German lines like a foreign language.

Renoir's 1928 silent film The Little Match Girl adapts a tale by which writer?

Hans Christian Andersen. Renoir's freezing match seller dreams herself into a toy-shop window, and the petals that fall on her at the end turn out to be snow.

Renoir's 1926 silent film Nana was based on a novel by which author?

Émile Zola. The lavish film flopped, and Renoir had to sell paintings left to him by his father to pay the debts, yet he came back to Zola in 1938 for La Bête Humaine.

Which director remade Renoir's La Chienne in Hollywood as the 1945 film noir Scarlet Street?

Fritz Lang. Nine years later he did it again, filming the novel behind another Renoir picture, La Bête Humaine, as Human Desire.

Which actor played the tramp Boudu in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)?

Michel Simon had played Boudu on stage in 1925. Set on bringing the tramp to the screen, he helped pay for the film himself and is credited as its producer.

Renoir's 1938 epic La Marseillaise dramatises the early years of which upheaval?

The French Revolution. The film follows 500 Marseille volunteers marching to Paris with the song that became the anthem, and trade unions helped pay for it by public subscription.

Which 1986 American comedy remade Boudu Saved from Drowning?

Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Paul Mazursky swapped the Seine for a swimming pool: Nick Nolte's drifter tries to drown himself in a rich family's backyard.

Renoir's 1935 Toni, shot on location with untrained actors, is widely seen as a forerunner of which movement?

Neorealism. Renoir filmed the true story of immigrant quarry workers near Martigues in Provence, close to where it happened, years before Italy's postwar directors took the same approach.

Which political movement were Jean Renoir's mid-1930s films associated with?

The Popular Front. Renoir supervised Life Belongs to Us, the Communist Party's campaign film for the 1936 elections that brought the left-wing coalition to power.

In The Crime of Monsieur Lange, a writer of Western stories and his workmates form a cooperative running what kind of business?

A publishing house, which thrives on Lange's tales of the cowboy Arizona Jim once its crooked boss vanishes. The film's stills photographer, Dora Maar, met Picasso that winter through the poet Paul Éluard.

Renoir's The Lower Depths (1936) was based on a play by which Russian writer?

Maxim Gorky. Renoir shot his Russian slum on the banks of the Seine near Paris, from a script co-written by Yevgeny Zamyatin, the exiled author of the dystopian novel We.

Which Japanese director made his own film of The Lower Depths in 1957, two decades after Renoir's?

Akira Kurosawa. He moved the play's flophouse from Russia to an Edo-period tenement, with Toshiro Mifune as the thief Jean Gabin had played for Renoir.

Marcel Dalio, Rosenthal in La Grande Illusion, fled the Nazis and played the croupier in which Hollywood classic?

Casablanca. While Dalio played Emil the croupier in Hollywood, the occupiers back in France put his face on posters as 'a typical Jew'.

At the end of La Grande Illusion, the fugitives Maréchal and Rosenthal cross the snow into which country?

Switzerland. A German patrol opens fire, then lowers its guns: the two specks in the snow have already crossed a border that, as Rosenthal says, nature cannot see.

La Grande Illusion became the first foreign-language film ever nominated for which Academy Award?

Best Picture. It lost to Frank Capra's You Can't Take It with You, and at Venice in 1937 Fascist pressure had kept it from the top prize, the Mussolini Cup, leaving it the award for best artistic ensemble.

Which Nazi minister branded La Grande Illusion 'Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1'?

Joseph Goebbels. He banned the pacifist film, and as German troops advanced across Europe they had orders to seize its prints and negative.

Which singer has a cameo in Renoir's French Cancan as the café-concert star Eugénie Buffet?

Édith Piaf. Renoir filled his tale of the Moulin Rouge's birth with music-hall stars of his own day playing the legends of the 1890s, with Patachou as Yvette Guilbert.

Haut-Koenigsbourg, the castle that plays the fortress prison in La Grande Illusion, stands in which French region?

Alsace. Kaiser Wilhelm II had the ruined castle rebuilt while the region was under German rule, so Renoir found a ready-made German fortress on French soil.

Which New Wave director named his production company Les Films du Carrosse after Renoir's The Golden Coach?

François Truffaut. He called The Golden Coach 'the noblest and most refined film ever made', though it had failed with critics and public alike on its release.

Which actress, later the star of Hollywood's Cat People, played opposite Jean Gabin in La Bête Humaine?

Simone Simon. She had come home dissatisfied with her first Hollywood contract when Renoir cast her as Séverine, and found her American fame only on her second try.

What job does Jean Gabin's character, Jacques Lantier, do in La Bête Humaine?

Railway engine driver. The film grew out of Jean Gabin's own wish to play a train driver, and Renoir treats Lantier's locomotive, La Lison, almost as a character.

In The Rules of the Game, Renoir's character Octave says the awful thing in this world is that everyone has what?

His reasons. Renoir spoke the line himself as Octave, and it became the motto of his films, which refuse to sort their characters into heroes and villains.

How did the audience react at the 1939 Paris premiere of Renoir's The Rules of the Game?

With boos and jeers. One spectator even tried to set fire to the cinema with a newspaper, and within months the government had banned the film as demoralising.

What happened to the original negative of Renoir's The Rules of the Game?

Destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1942. In the 1950s two young enthusiasts, Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand, rebuilt a near-complete version with Renoir's help.

Which Robert Altman film about masters and servants at a shooting party drew on Renoir's The Rules of the Game?

Gosford Park. Altman moved the upstairs-downstairs intrigue to an English country-house weekend in 1932 and added a murder, and the script won Julian Fellowes an Oscar.

Renoir's short film A Day in the Country, left unfinished in 1936, adapts a story by which French writer?

Guy de Maupassant. Renoir shot it in the summer of 1936 and never completed it; the 40 minutes of footage were edited ten years later and released in 1946.

Which celebrated photographer worked as an assistant director on Renoir's The Rules of the Game?

Henri Cartier-Bresson. He also appears on screen as William, the English servant, having already played a seminarian for Renoir in A Day in the Country.

How does the aviator André Jurieux die at the end of Renoir's The Rules of the Game?

Shot by a jealous husband: the estate's gamekeeper mistakes him, in a borrowed overcoat, for the man he thinks is running off with his wife. The Marquis then passes the killing off as an unfortunate accident.

With whom did Renoir share a cabin on the ship from Lisbon to America in 1940?

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The friendship outlasted the voyage: in America the two worked on a film of his memoir Wind, Sand and Stars, though it was never made.

What was Renoir's first American film, released in 1941?

Swamp Water. Renoir filmed in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, but his Fox contract ended after this one picture; studio head Darryl Zanuck said he had plenty of talent but was 'not one of us'.

Which of Renoir's Hollywood films earned him his only Academy Award nomination for directing?

The Southerner. He lost the Oscar to Billy Wilder, yet the film took the best film prize at Venice in 1946, even though the censor in Memphis had banned it as a slur on Southern farmers.

Which British star played the cowardly schoolteacher who turns hero in Renoir's This Land Is Mine?

Charles Laughton. His timid teacher ends the film reading the Declaration of the Rights of Man to his class as German soldiers arrive to take him away.

Renoir's The River (1951) was shot in which country?

India. Hollywood turned the project down, Renoir recalled, because India without elephants and tiger hunts was not India, so the owner of a chain of florist shops financed it.

Which novelist, also the author of Black Narcissus, wrote the book behind Renoir's The River?

Rumer Godden. She had hated earlier screen versions of her books, so Renoir brought her in to co-write the script, drawn from her own childhood.

Claude Renoir, who photographed The River, was what relation to its director, Jean Renoir?

His nephew. Jean did have a younger brother called Claude, but the cameraman was the son of his elder brother Pierre, and later shot Barbarella and a James Bond film.

Which actress starred in Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952)?

Anna Magnani. The Italian star played the part in English: money for a parallel French version ran out, and Renoir always preferred the undubbed cut with the actors' own voices.

Renoir's The Golden Coach follows a commedia dell'arte troupe in which country?

Peru. The tale of a viceroy, his new coach and a touring actress comes from a Prosper Mérimée play, though Renoir built his Spanish colony on Italian sound stages.

What milestone did French Cancan (1955) mark for Renoir?

His first film shot in France since 1939. He recreated the birth of the Moulin Rouge on studio sets and was reunited with Jean Gabin, the star of three of his 1930s films.

Renoir's Elena and Her Men was Ingrid Bergman's first film in years for a director other than which husband?

Roberto Rossellini. Renoir wrote the comedy for Bergman because he wanted to see her play for laughs, and modelled its general on Georges Boulanger, who nearly toppled the Third Republic.

Renoir's 1959 comedy Picnic on the Grass shares its French title with a scandalous 1863 painting by which artist?

Édouard Manet. In Renoir's film a scientist who wants to replace sex with artificial insemination goes picnicking and nature gets the better of him; it was shot on the Renoir family's old estate.

Renoir's The Testament of Doctor Cordelier retells which classic tale?

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Jean-Louis Barrault plays both the doctor and his brutish double, Opale, and Renoir shot it like live television, with several cameras running at once.

What honour did Renoir receive from the Academy in 1975?

A lifetime achievement Oscar, his only one: his single nomination as a director had lost nearly thirty years before. Too ill to attend, he watched at home as Ingrid Bergman accepted it on the night she won an Oscar herself.

Which future director of The Leopard worked on Renoir's A Day in the Country as a young assistant?

Luchino Visconti. The young Milanese count owed the job to Coco Chanel, a mutual friend who introduced him to Renoir.

Renoir's brother Pierre was the first actor to play which detective on screen?

Inspector Maigret. Pierre played him for Jean in Night at the Crossroads (1932), reaching the screen ahead of a second Maigret film released the same year.

Which director wrote 'Jean Renoir: The Greatest of All Directors' on his death in 1979?

Orson Welles. His tribute opened with a jab at Hollywood: its high and mighty, he wrote, prized a Renoir on the wall like a Rolls-Royce in the garage, yet gave no such status to the painter's son living among them.

What was the title of Renoir's 1974 memoir?

My Life and My Films. With no backers for new pictures and his health failing, he turned to writing in his last years, publishing novels as well as this memoir.

Renoir wrote his stage play Orvet (1955) for which dancer turned film star?

Leslie Caron. Renoir had tried and failed to have her cast in French Cancan, so he wrote her a play instead and staged it himself in Paris.

Renoir began filming a version of Tosca in which Italian city in 1940, before the war forced him to leave?

Rome. The French government had encouraged the project in the hope of keeping Italy neutral; it failed, and Renoir's friend Carl Koch finished the film without him.

Which former wife of Charlie Chaplin played the title role in Renoir's The Diary of a Chambermaid?

Paulette Goddard. Her husband at the time, Burgess Meredith, co-wrote the script, co-produced the film and played the eccentric neighbour who proposes to her maid.

Renoir's son Alain became a professor of medieval English literature at which university?

UC Berkeley. As a teenager Alain had been an assistant cameraman on his father's films; he then fought in the Pacific with the American army before turning to Beowulf.

Which French film star sings 'Quand l'amour meurt' in Renoir's last film, made for television in 1970?

Jeanne Moreau. With money for cinema features ever harder to find, Renoir, in his seventies, made The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir as his farewell for television.

Renoir's The Rules of the Game was runner-up to which film in three straight Sight & Sound critics' polls?

Citizen Kane, in 1972, 1982 and 1992. Renoir's film had only tied for tenth in the first poll in 1952; its climb began after a restored version was unveiled at Venice in 1959.

Renoir's penultimate film, The Elusive Corporal (1962), is set among French POWs in which war?

World War II. A quarter-century after La Grande Illusion, Renoir went back to the prison camps, this time among conscripts rather than officers, whose escape ends in occupied Paris.