Claire's Dutch father, a friend of van Gogh, whose clients included Toulouse-Lautrec,[6] was the owner of a prestigious picture-framing company near the Place Vendôme in Paris, and he brought Georges-Emmanuel into the family business.

Returning to Paris, he joined the semi-professional rugby team Racing Club de France, captained by Alfred Sauvy, and whose supporters included Tristan Bernard.

[11] Although he had likely played music hall engagements before, his act was first mentioned in 1935, when he performed at the gala for the newspaper Le Journal, celebrating the French victory in setting the transatlantic crossing record from Normandy.

Upon his return to Paris in the same year, he was immediately hired as top billing at the ABC Théâtre,[12] alongside the singer Marie Dubas, where he would work uninterrupted until the outbreak of the Second World War.

During the 1930s, he began to experiment with film, acting in the following shorts: In September 1939, Tati was conscripted back into his 16th Regiment of Dragoons, which was then incorporated into the 3rd Division Legere de Cavalerie (DLC).

Tati's first major feature, Jour de fête (The Big Day), is about an inept rural village postman who interrupts his duties to inspect the traveling fair that has come to town.

Les Vacances introduced the character of Mr. Hulot and follows his adventures in France during the mandatory August vacation at a beach resort, lampooning several hidebound elements of French political and social classes.

[17] André Bazin, founder of the influential journal Cahiers du cinéma, wrote in his 1957 essay, "Fifteen Years of French Cinema": "Tati could easily have made lots of money with sequels featuring his comic character of the little rural mailman.

The plot centers on Mr. Hulot's comedic, quixotic, and childlike struggle with postwar France's obsession with modernity and American-style consumerism, entwined with the relationship he has with his nine-year-old nephew, Gérard.

In Place de la Pelouse (Saint-Maur-des-Fossés), there stands a bronze statue of Tati as Monsieur Hulot talking to a boy, in a pose echoing the movie's poster, which was designed by Pierre Étaix.

In an essay for the Criterion Collection, Kent Jones wrote: After the success of Mon Oncle in 1958, Jacques Tati had become fed up with Monsieur Hulot, his signature comic creation.

Tati famously built an entire glass and steel mini-city (nicknamed Tativille) on the outskirts of Paris for the film, which took years to build and left him mired in debt.

[24] In the film, Hulot and a group of American tourists lose themselves in the futuristic glass and steel of the commercially globalised modern Parisian suburbs, where only human nature and a few reflective views of the old city of Paris itself still emerge to breathe life into the sterile new metropolis.

Playtime had even less of a plot than Tati's earlier films, and he endeavored to make his characters, including Hulot, almost incidental to his portrayal of a modernist and robotic Paris.

[28] The Dutch-funded Trafic (Traffic), although originally designed to be a TV film, received a theatrical release in 1971, and placed Monsieur Hulot back at the centre of the action.

Confusion, a planned collaboration with pop duo Sparks, was a story about a futuristic Paris where activity is centered around television, communication, advertising, and modern society's infatuation with visual imagery.

What would have been its title track, "Confusion", appears on Sparks' 1976 Big Beat album, with the internal sleeve of its 2006 re-mastered CD featuring a letter announcing the pending collaboration, as well as a photo of the Mael brothers in conversation with Tati.

It tells the bittersweet tale of a modestly talented magician – referred to only as the Illusionist – who, during a tour of decaying music halls in Eastern Europe, protectively takes an impoverished young woman under his wing.

Now, however, the family of Tati's illegitimate and estranged eldest child, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, who lives in the north-east of England, are calling for the French director to give her credit as the true inspiration for the film.

[38][39] At the Lido de Paris, Tati met and fell in love with the young Czech-Austrian dancer Herta Schiel, who had fled Vienna with her sister Molly at the time of the Anschluss.

While residing there, they completed the script for L'École des facteurs (The School for Postmen), which later provided material for his first hugely successful feature, Jour de fête.

[41][42] Herta Schiel remained in Paris throughout the war, where she met physician Jacques Weil, after he was called upon to treat her sister Molly for the then-incurable disease of tuberculosis.

Having been at the centre of the Christmas Eve bombing of the main Marrakech market in which she witnessed the massacre of a number of her boarding school friends, Helga Marie-Jeanne was actively encouraged by the French Consulate to flee Morocco for her own safety.

Holding only a French passport she wrote to her father in hope that he would show compassion towards her plight and help her escape the hostilities that had built up in Morocco by offering her safe passage back to her home city of Paris.

Weakened by serious health problems, Tati died on 5 November 1982, aged 75, of a pulmonary embolism, leaving a final scenario, Confusion, which he had completed with Jacques Lagrange.

[clarification needed] In 1995, after a year of meticulous work, Sophie, with the aid of film technician François Ede, was able for the first time to release a colour print of Jour de fête, as Tati had originally intended.

[44] Having lost her brother Pierre to a traffic accident, and having herself been diagnosed terminally ill, Sophie Tatischeff took the initiative to set up Les Films de Mon Oncle in 2001 to preserve, restore, and circulate her father's work.

Enlisting the services of Jérôme Deschamps, the artistic and cultural mission of Les Films de Mon Oncle is to allow audiences as well as researchers to (re-)discover the work of Tati the filmmaker, his archives, and to ensure its influence around the world.

The restoration of Playtime began in 1998, when Sophie Tatischeff made the acquaintance of Jean-Rene Failot, technical director of the Gulliver Arane, the only remaining large-format film laboratory in Europe.

He opened a window to a world that I'd never looked out on before, and I thought, 'God, that's interesting,' how a comic situation can be developed as purely visual and yet it's not under-cranked, it's not speeded-up, Benny Hill comedy—it's more deliberate; it takes its time.