Pierre Renoir

Biography: life and films

Pierre Renoir was born in Paris on 21st March 1885. He came from an illustrious family of artists, each excelling in his own field. His father was the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir and his younger brothers, Jean and Claude, respectively made their mark as a film director and a ceramist of great renown. Leaving the Paris Conservatoire in 1907 with the first prize in tragedy, Renoir immediately embarked on a prolific stage career and within two decades he became one of the great theatrical actors of his generation. In the silent era, cinema held no interest for him, although he did appear in Abel Gance's La Digue (1911) and accepted a bit part in his brother Jean's La Fille de l'eau (1925). On stage, he often worked alongside his wife Véra Sergine. In 1913, the couple had a son, Claude, who would become a world renowned cinematographer.

The outbreak of WWI brought a brief halt to Pierre Renoir's stage career. Wounded in combat, he lost the use of his right forearm, but this did not stop him from resuming his stage work. In 1926, he became a welcome addition to Louis Jouvet's famous theatrical troupe and performed in several notable productions of works by Jean Giraudoux (Siegfried, Amphitryon 38, Intermezzo), as well as plays by authors as diverse as Marcel Achard, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Prosper Mérimée. After divorcing Véra Sergine, he married another actress, Marie-Louise Iribe, in 1925. Together, they founded a film production company, Les Artistes réunis, which made just three films, the best known being Jean Renoir's Marquitta (1927). The marriage ended in 1933, and Renoir married for a third time in 1940, to the actress Elisa Ruis.

It was the actor's younger brother Jean, now an established filmmaker, who persuaded him to become a screen actor, just after the arrival of the talkies. He had his first important screen role in Jean Renoir's inspired Georges Simenon adaptation La Nuit du carrefour (1932), as cinema's first (and arguably best) Jules Maigret. With his strong physical presence, natural air of authority and slight aura of menace, Renoir made a perfect Maigret, and it was no accident that in his subsequent screen career he would often get to play similar morally ambiguous authority figures. He was also well equipped to handle more sympathetic characters, and he shows a lighter side in two of his brother's other films. He made a humane Charles Bovary opposite Valentine Tessier in Madame Bovary (1933) and was an ineffectual but engaging Louis XVI in La Marseillaise (1938).

Another defining screen role for Pierre Renoir was the eye-patch-wearing Foreign Legion officer in Julien Duvivier's La Bandera (1935). The tough uniformed disciplinarian is a type the actor would play on screen many times over the following decade, often in inferior films such as Marcel L'Herbier's Veille d'armes (1935) and La Route impériale (1935). In Robert Siodmak's Pièges (1939), Renoir fully embraced the darker side of his persona, the side that is only partly glimpsed in previous roles, and this led him to be cast as more sinister characters in films such as Guillaume Radot's Le Loup des Malveneur (1943), in which he is magnificent as a completely unhinged scientist. Several filmmakers made good use of the actor's apparent split persona, his outer shell of bourgeois respectability frequently shattered to reveal something much nastier within. Renoir is pleasingly sinister in René Le Hénaff's Le Mystère Saint-Val (1945), one of the few comedies he lent his talents to.

For most of the 1940s, Renoir was wasted on lacklustre films that have mostly fallen into oblivion (Maurice Gleize's L'Appel du bled, Jacques de Baroncelli's Marie la Misère, Alfred Rode's Cargaison clandestine), but there were a few choice roles in which he excelled. He was an effective replacement for Erich von Stroheim in the 1942, Nazi-authorised re-release of Jean Delanoy's Macao, l'enfer de jeu. He is frighteningly convincing as a gangland boss in Jacques Becker's Dernier atout (1942), and in Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis (1945) he is perfect for the role of the tenebrous peddler Jéricho (replacing Robert Le Vigan after he had hotfooted it to Germany). He also brings great value to Robert Vernay's Le Père Goriot (1944) as the devious escaped convict Vautrin.

After the war, decent film roles for Renoir appeared to be thin on the ground, but he did turn in some impressive performances in two of Jean-Devaivre's films: La Dame d'onze heures (1948) and La Ferme des sept péchés (1949). Guy Lefranc's film comedy Knock (1951) is of interest because it is the last time he acted with Louis Jouvet. Renoir's screen career ended honourably enough with Raymond Bernard's Le Jugement de Dieu (1952). He died in Paris on 11th March 1952, aged 66 and is now buried in the cemetery at Essoyes in the French department of Aube, along with his father, mother and two brothers. Although he appeared in 65 films and took on many memorable roles, The actor's main claim to fame is as a man of the theatre. From Molière and Shakespeare to Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux and Jules Romains, his stage repertoire was immense - every bit as rich and abundant as the artistic achievements of his father and brothers.

Filmography

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