![[Trailer] Jean Renoir - L' Angelo del Male](http://web.archive.org./web/20110504064330im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/KPq_aqdjHEI/0.jpg "[Trailer] Jean Renoir - L' Angelo del Male")
| Name | Jean Renoir |
|---|---|
| Birth date | September 15, 1894 |
| Birth place | Paris, France |
| Death date | February 12, 1979 |
| Death place | Beverly Hills, California, United States |
| Occupation | Actor, director, screenwriter, producer, author |
| Years active | 1924–1978 |
| Spouse | Catherine Hessling (1920–1930) Dido Freire (1944–1979) |
Jean Renoir (; 15 September 1894 – 12 February 1979) was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, the painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Renoir, My Father (1962).
As a child, Renoir moved with his family to the south of France. 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, which, as he later wrote, he continually ran away from.
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, who was also his father's last model, Catherine Hessling. At this stage his films did not produce a return, and Renoir gradually sold paintings inherited from his father to finance them.
By the middle of the decade Renoir was associated with the Popular Front, and several of his films, such as The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, 1935), La Vie Est a Nous (People of France) (1936) and La Marseillaise (1938), reflect the movement's politics. In 1937 he made one of his most well-known films, Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion), starring Erich von Stroheim and the immensely popular Jean Gabin. A film on the theme of brotherhood about a series of escape attempts by French POWs during World War I, it was enormously successful but was also banned in Germany, and later in Italy after having won the "Best Artistic Ensemble" award at the Venice Film Festival. This was followed by another cinematic success: The Human Beast (La Bête Humaine) (1938), a film noir tragedy based on the novel by Émile Zola and starring Simone Simon and Jean Gabin.
In 1939, now able to co-finance his own films, Renoir made The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu), a satire on contemporary French society with an ensemble cast. Renoir himself played the character Octave, a sort of master of ceremonies in the film. The film was met with derision by Parisian audiences upon its premiere and was extensively reedited, but without success. It was his greatest commercial failure. A few weeks after the outbreak of World War II, the film was banned. The ban was lifted briefly in 1940, but after the fall of France it was banned again. Subsequently the original negative of the film was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid. Today The Rules of the Game appears frequently near the top of critic's polls as one of the best films ever made.
In 1945 he made Diary of a Chambermaid, an adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel, Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, starring Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith. The Woman on the Beach (1947) starring Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan was heavily reshot and reedited after it fared poorly among preview audiences in California. Both films were poorly received and were the last films Renoir made in America. At this time, Renoir became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
After returning to work in Europe, Renoir made a trilogy of Technicolor musical comedies on the subjects of theater, politics and commerce: Le Carrosse d'or (The Golden Coach) (1953) with Anna Magnani, French Cancan with Jean Gabin and María Félix (1955) and Eléna et les hommes (Elena and Her Men) with Ingrid Bergman and Jean Marais (1956). During the same period, Renoir produced in Paris the Clifford Odets play, The Big Knife, and wrote and produced in Paris for Leslie Caron his own play, Orvet.
Renoir's next films were made in 1959 using techniques Renoir adapted from live television at the time. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Picnic on the Grass), starring Paul Meurisse and Catherine Rouvel, was filmed on the grounds of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (The Testament of Doctor Cordelier), starring Jean-Louis Barrault, was made in the streets of Paris and its suburbs.In 1962 Renoir made what was to be his penultimate film, Le Caporal épinglé (The Elusive Corporal) with Jean-Pierre Cassel and Claude Brasseur. Set among French POWs during their internment in labor camps by the Nazis during World War II, the film explores the twin human needs for freedom, on the one hand, and emotional and economic security, on the other.
In 1962, Renoir published a loving memoir of his father, Renoir, My Father, in which he described the profound influence his father had on him and his work. As funds for his film projects were becoming harder to obtain, Renoir continued to write screenplays and then wrote a novel, The Notebooks of Captain Georges, published in 1966. Captain Georges is the nostalgic account of a wealthy young man's sentimental education and love for a peasant girl, a theme also explored earlier in his films Diary of a Chambermaid and Picnic on the Grass.
In 1973 Renoir was preparing a production of his stage play Carola with Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer when he fell ill and was unable to direct. The producer Norman Lloyd, a friend and actor in The Southerner, took over the direction of the play, which was broadcast in the series program Hollywood Television Theater on WNET, Channel 13, New York on February 3, 1973.
In his memoirs My Life and My Films (1974) Renoir wrote of the influence exercised upon him by his cousin, Gabrielle Renard, the woman seen in the portrait by his father above. Shortly before his birth, she came to live with the Renoir family, and helped raise the young boy. She introduced him to the Guignol puppet shows in the Montmartre of his childhood: "She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes", he wrote. "She taught me to detest the cliché." He concluded his memoirs with the words he had often spoken as a child, "Wait for me, Gabrielle."
In 1975 he received a lifetime Academy Award for his contribution to the motion picture industry and that same year a retrospective of his work was shown at the National Film Theatre in London. Also in 1975, the government of France elevated him to the rank of commander in the Légion d'honneur.
Jean Renoir died in Beverly Hills, California on February 12, 1979. His body was returned to France and buried beside his family in the cemetery at Essoyes, Aube, France.
Jean Renoir has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6212 Hollywood Blvd. Several of his ceramics were collected by Albert Barnes and can be found on display beneath his father's paintings at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania.
Category:1894 births Category:1979 deaths Category:American people of French descent Category:French expatriates in the United States Category:French film actors Category:French film directors Category:French immigrants to the United States Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:People from Paris Category:Pierre-Auguste Renoir Category:Academy Honorary Award recipients
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She is the daughter of Nilakanta Sri Ram who was the fifth President of the T.S. Adyar as well. She was educated in Theosophical Schools and was a student in Rukmini Devi Arundale's school of classical Indian dance (the Kalakshetra Foundation). Later on she went to the Benares Hindu University from which she obtained a B.A. with distinction and a M.A. on Sanskrit, standing first in that University. She played a pivotal role in Jean Renoir's film The River (Le Fleuve).
She joined the Theosophical Society in 1935 and was president of youth and adult Lodges for several years. She was President of the Madras Theosophical Federation (1959-63) and librarian and worker at the Indian Section Headquarters of the TS (1945-51). She has been a member of the General Council of the TS (Adyar) since 1960, and has been in its Executive Committee, Finance Committee and Theosophical Publishing House Council for many years. She has lectured extensively around the world on a regular basis since 1960 and has been guest speaker at many conventions, congresses and summer schools. She presided over three World Congresses of the Theosophical Society: 1982 in Nairobi, Kenya; 1993 in Brasilia, Brazil, and 2001 in Sydney, Australia. In July 1990 she conducted two well-attended seminars on "Human Regeneration" at the International Theosophical Centre in Naarden, The Netherlands, which included participants from many countries. In one of the sessions, speaking on "Regeneration and the Objects of the T.S.", she said: "Universal brotherhood, the realization of a mind in which there is no prejudice whatsoever, no barrier against anything, is regeneration, because such a consciousness is totally different from the ordinary consciousness." She is the author of numerous articles in The Theosophist, of which she has been the editor since 1980, and other Theosophical journals. She supervised and directed the work of the Adyar Library and Research Centre since 1954 and is the editor of the Library's research journals and publications. She also translated Sanskrit works for publication.
Radha Burnier is the Head of the Krotona Institute of Theosophy in Ojai, California; The Manor Centre in Sydney and President of the International Theosophical Centre in Naarden, Holland. She is president of the Olcott Education Society, The Theosophical Order of Service (founded by Annie Besant in 1908), the Besant Education Fellowship and founder of The New Life for India Movement (1968), which promotes right citizenship, right values and right means among Indians. She is a former member of "Le Droit Humain" and presently is the Head of the Eastern Order of International Co-Freemasonry. She was also a close associate of Jiddu Krishnamurti and is a Trustee of the Krishnamurti Foundation India. On 4 November 1980, at her invitation, Krishnamurti visited Adyar after an absence of 47 years. He walked with her and a number of residents from the main gate of the compound to the sea-shore and visited the beach where he was discovered, in 1909, by C. W. Leadbeater. Two years later, in December 1982, during the Adyar Centenary Convention of the TS, Krishnamurti planted a pippal [boddhi] tree at Adyar.
Category:Indian Theosophists Category:1923 births Category:Living people Category:Banaras Hindu University alumni
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| Name | Louis Jouvet |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Jules Eugène Louis Jouvet |
| Birth date | 24 December 1887 |
| Birth place | Bouillon-sur-Semois, Belgium |
| Birth place | Crozon, France |
| Death date | 16 August 1951 |
| Death place | Paris, France |
| Occupation | Actor, Director, Theatre Manager |
| Spouse | Else Collin (1886 - 1967)Madeleine Ozeray (? - 1943) |
, Paris, named for Jouvet]]
Louis Jouvet (24 December 1887 - 16 August 1951) was a renowned French actor, director, and theatre director.
While influential, Copeau's theater was never lucrative. Jouvet left in October 1922 for the Comédie des Champs-Élysées (the small stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées). In December 1923 he staged his single most successful production, the satire Dr. Knock, written by Jules Romains. Jouvet's meticulous characterization of the manipulative crank doctor was informed by his own experience in pharmacy school. It became his signature and his standby; "Jouvet was to produce it almost every year until the end of his life".
Jouvet began an ongoing close collaboration with playwright Jean Giraudoux in 1928, with a radical streamlining of Giraudoux's 1922 Siegfried et le Limousin for the stage. Their work together included the first staging of The Madwoman of Chaillot in 1945, at the Théâtre de l'Athénée, where Jouvet served as director from 1934 through his death in 1951.
Jouvet starred in some 34 films, including two records of Dr. Knock, once in 1933 and again in 1951. He was professor at the French National Academy of Dramatic Arts. He died of a heart attack in 1951, and is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. The Athénée theatre now bears his name.
He was the uncle of Anglo-French actor Peter Wyngarde.
Category:1887 births Category:1951 deaths Category:French actors Category:French theatre directors Category:French military personnel of World War I Category:Légion d'honneur recipients Category:Burials at Montmartre Cemetery, Paris
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
