René Auberjonois

René Marie Murat Auberjonois was born June 1, 1940, in Manhattan, New York City. His father, Swiss-born Fernand Auberjonois, was a Cold War-era foreign correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer. Auberjonois' mother, Princess Laure Louise Napoléone Eugénie Caroline Murat, was a great-great-granddaughter of Joachim Murat (one of Napoleon's marshals and King of Naples during the First French Empire), and his wife—Napoleon's youngest sister—Caroline Bonaparte. Auberjonois had a sister and a brother, and two half-sisters from his mother's first marriage. Auberjonois wrote that his French family name, an uncommon one in the United States, means "armorer."

Auberjonois' grandfather, also René Auberjonois, was a Swiss post-Impressionist painter. His maternal grandmother, Hélène Macdonald Stallo, was an American from Cincinnati, Ohio; his maternal grandfather's mother was a Russian noblewoman, Eudoxia Michailovna Somova, and his maternal grandfather's paternal grandmother, Caroline Georgina Fraser, who was the wife of Prince Napoleon Lucien Charles Murat, was a Scottish-American from Charleston, South Carolina.

Auberjonois' family moved to Paris after World War II. After a few years in France, the family moved back to the United States and joined the South Mountain Road artists' colony in Rockland County, New York, whose residents included Burgess Meredith, John Houseman, and Lotte Lenya.

The Auberjonois family also lived for a time in London, where Auberjonois completed high school while studying theater. To complete his education, he attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts in 1962.

Auberjonois was a member of the original faculty of the Juilliard School's Drama Division when it opened in 1968 under John Houseman.