Catherine Hessling

Catherine Hessling (born Andrée Madeleine Heuschling, 22 June 1900, Moronvilliers, Marne – 28 September 1979, La Celle-Saint-Cloud, Yvelines) was a French actress and the first wife of film director Jean Renoir. Hessling appeared in 15, mostly silent, films before retiring from the acting profession and withdrawing from public life in the mid-1930s.

Hessling, born in Champagne-Ardennes, had sought refuge in Nice during World War I. Her paternal ancestors came from Alsace but moved to Champagne-Ardennes when Alsace transferred to Germany. In 1917, her beauty came to the attention of Henri Matisse, who sent her to fellow artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir as he thought she looked like a suitable Renoir subject. Hessling modelled, clothed and nude, for Renoir until his death in December 1919. Renoir's second son, Jean, fell in love with Hessling, and the couple married on 24 January 1920. Hessling gave birth to a son, Alain Renoir, on 31 October 1921.

Jean Renoir had been planning a career in ceramic art but decided instead to try his hand in the medium of film in the attempt, he would later claim, to make Hessling a star. While both were aficionados of American films, and Hessling copied fashions and behaviour she saw on the screen, she had in fact never had any thought or ambition to become an actress herself.

Renoir produced his first script, Catherine, in 1924. Albert Dieudonné would direct the film. Renoir devised for Hessling a very stark, exaggerated look, with the mouth and eyes a penetrating black against white facial make-up, which was again used in his first full-length film La Fille de l'eau, and the lavish and costly adaptation of Émile Zola's Nana (1926), in which Hessling's performance has been described as characteristically stylised and unsubtle, yet appropriate for this role.

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