René Clair (French: [ʁəne klɛʁ]; 11 November 1898 – 15 March 1981), born René-Lucien Chomette ([ʁəne lysjɛ̃ ʃɔmɛt]), was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films which often featured fantasy comedy themes. He went on to make some of the most innovative early sound films in France, before going abroad to work in the United Kingdom and the United States for more than a decade. Returning to France in the aftermath of World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier years. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1960. Clair's best known films include Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat, 1928), Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930), Le Million (1931), À nous la liberté (1931), I Married a Witch (1942), and And Then There Were None (1945).

René Clair was born and grew up in Paris in the district of Les Halles, whose lively and picturesque character made a lasting impression on him. His father was a soap merchant; he had an elder brother, Henri Chomette (born 1896). He attended the Lycée Montaigne and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. In 1914 he was studying philosophy; his friends at that time included Raymond Payelle who became the actor and writer Philippe Hériat. In 1917, at the age of 18, he served as an ambulance driver in World War I, before being invalided out with a spinal injury. He was deeply affected by the horrors of war that he witnessed and gave expression to this in writing a volume of poetry called La Tête de l'homme (which remained unpublished). Back in Paris after the war, he started a career as a journalist at the left-wing newspaper L'Intransigeant.

Having met the music-hall singer Damia and written some songs for her, Clair was persuaded by her to visit the Gaumont studios in 1920 where a film was being cast and he then agreed to take on a leading role in Le Lys de la vie, directed by Loïe Fuller and Gabrielle Sorère. He adopted the stage-name of René Clair, and several other acting jobs followed, including Parisette for Louis Feuillade. In 1922 he extended his career as a journalist, becoming the editor of a new film supplement to a monthly magazine, Théâtre et Comœdia illustrés. He also visited Belgium and after an introduction from his brother Henri, he became an assistant to the director Jacques de Baroncelli on several films.

In 1924, with the support of the producer Henri Diamant-Berger, Clair got the opportunity to direct his own first film, Paris qui dort (The Crazy Ray), a short comic fantasy. Before it had been shown however, Clair was asked by Francis Picabia and Erik Satie to make a short film to be shown as part of their Dadaist ballet Relâche; he made Entr'acte (1924), and it established Clair as a leading member of the Parisian avant-garde.

Fantasy and dreams were also components of his next two films, but in 1926 Clair took a new direction when he joined Alexandre Kamenka's Films Albatros company to film a dramatic story, La Proie du vent (The Prey of the Wind), which met with commercial success. He remained at Albatros for his last two silent films, Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (An Italian Straw Hat) and Les Deux Timides (Two Timid Souls) (both 1928), in which he sought to translate the essentially verbal comedy of two plays by Labiche into works of silent cinema. While at Albatros, Clair met the designer Lazare Meerson and the cameraman Georges Périnal who were to remain important collaborators with him for the next decade. By the end of the silent era, Clair was celebrated as one of the great names in cinema, alongside Griffith, Chaplin, Pabst and Eisenstein. As the author of all of his own scripts, who also paid close attention to every aspect of the making of a film, including the editing, Clair was one of the first French film-makers to establish for himself the full role of an auteur.

Clair was initially sceptical about the introduction of sound to films, and called it "an unnatural creation". He then realised the creative possibilities that it offered, particularly, in his view, if the soundtrack was not used realistically; words and pictures need not, and indeed should not, be tied together in a clumsy duplication of information; dialogue did not always need to be heard. Between 1930 and 1933, Clair explored these ideas in his first four sound films, starting with Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris); this was followed by Le Million (1931), À nous la liberté (1931), and Quatorze juillet (Bastille Day) (1933). All of these films portrayed an affectionate and idealized view of working class life, and they did much to create a popular romantic image of Paris which was seen around the world. These films were made at the Epinay Studios for Films Sonores Tobis, a French subsidiary of the German-owned Tobis company.

When Chaplin made Modern Times in 1936, it was noted that some parts of it bore a marked similarity to scenes in À nous la liberté, and the production company Tobis launched a lawsuit for plagiarism against United Artists, the producers of Chaplin's film. Clair was embarrassed by this since he acknowledged his own debt to the spirit of Chaplin, and he refused to be associated with the action.

After the immense success of these early sound films, Clair met with a major setback when his next film, Le Dernier Milliardaire (The Last Billionaire/The Last Millionaire) (1934), was a critical and commercial flop. While he was visiting London for the film's British première, he met Alexander Korda who offered him a contract to work in England. He accepted, and began a lengthy period of exile from film-making in France.