"[2][3][4][5] Pauline Kael wrote that "At his greatest, Jean Renoir expresses the beauty in our common humanity—the desires and hopes, the absurdities and follies, that we all, to one degree or another, share.

"[6] Per The New York Times: "The style that ran through Mr. Renoir's films — a mixture of tenderness, irony and Gallic insouciance‐was caught in a famous line from his 1939 masterpiece, The Rules of the Game.

"[7] Renoir was largely raised by Gabrielle Renard, his nanny and his mother's cousin, with whom he developed a strong bond.

His father's financial success ensured that the young Renoir was educated at fashionable boarding schools, from which, as he later wrote, he frequently ran away.

[21][22] In 1937, he made La Grande Illusion, one of his best-known films, starring Erich von Stroheim and Jean Gabin.

A film on the theme of brotherhood, relating a series of escape attempts by French POWs during World War I, it was enormously successful.

[24] In 1939, able to co-finance his own films,[25] Renoir made The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu), a satire on contemporary French society with an ensemble cast.

Renoir was a known pacifist and supporter of the French Communist Party, which made him suspect in the tense weeks before the war began.

[34][35] A week after the disastrous premiere of The Rules of the Game in July 1939, Renoir went to Rome with Karl Koch and Dido Freire, subsequently his second wife, to work on the script for a film version of Tosca.

He was sent back to Italy, to teach film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and resume work on Tosca.

He co-produced and directed an anti-Nazi film set in France, This Land Is Mine (1943), starring Maureen O'Hara and Charles Laughton.

[50][51][52] Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) is an adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel, Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, starring Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith.

[53][54] His 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.

[60] Based on the novel of the same name by Rumer Godden, the film is both a meditation on human beings' relationship with nature and a coming of age story of three young girls in colonial India.

[62] After returning to work in Europe, Renoir made a trilogy of color musical comedies on the subjects of theater, politics and commerce: Le Carrosse d'or (The Golden Coach, 1953) with Anna Magnani; French Cancan (1954) with Jean Gabin and María Félix; and Eléna et les hommes (Elena and Her Men, 1956) with Ingrid Bergman and Jean Marais.

[66] Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Picnic on the Grass, 1959), 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, also 1959), starring Jean-Louis Barrault, was made in the streets of Paris and its suburbs.

[67][68] Renoir's penultimate film, Le Caporal épinglé (The Elusive Corporal, 1962), with Jean-Pierre Cassel and Claude Brasseur,[69] is set among French POWs during their internment in labor camps by the Nazis during World War II.

[73][74] 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.

[77][78] Unable to obtain financing for his films and suffering declining health, Renoir spent his last years receiving friends at his home in Beverly Hills, and writing novels and his memoirs.

[79] 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.

He wrote of the influence exercised by Gabrielle Renard, his nanny and his mother's cousin, with whom he developed a mutual lifelong bond.

[88] Renoir's films have influenced many other directors, including Éric Rohmer,[89] Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet,[90] Peter Bogdanovich,[91] François Truffaut,[92] Robert Altman,[93] Errol Morris[94] Martin Scorsese[95] and Mike Leigh.

[87] Four of Renoir's crew members, Satyajit Ray,[97] Luchino Visconti,[98] Robert Aldrich[99] and Jacques Becker,[100][101][102][103] would go on to become highly acclaimed directors in their own right.

[107] According to David Thomson, Renoir was "the model of humanist cinema, an informal genre that included Frank Capra, Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Yasujirō Ozu or even Charlie Chaplin.

"[108] In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, he writes: "Renoir asks us to see the variety and muddle of life without settling for one interpretation.