Simone Signoret

She made a career on playing loose women, often prostitutes, but even when not collecting money she played kept women where her love was illicitly sought.  As she got older she had a field day playing bourgeois wives and girlfriends.  No matter the film or role, her characters were earthy, wise, opinionated, sensuous and unbeatable as a woman in love.  And yet there was always that vulnerability that made them so damned real.  If one were to name France's greatest stars of all time, Simone Signoret's name would be among them.

She straddled the classic era of French cinema, 1960s Hollywood and British kitchen sink drama in a series of brilliant performances.  She embodied the daring end of post war cinema, spreading fairy dust around in even the smallest of roles before going on to play some of the strongest and most complex of characters.

Simone Henriette Charlotte Kaminker was born in Germany in 1921 to a French-born linguist father from a Polish-Jewish family who was an army officer and a mother who was French Catholic.  The children, including two younger brothers, were raised in an exceedingly liberal atmosphere in Paris.  It was a comfortable upbringing, an intellectually stimulating environment, where they were taught to question authority and care about the disenfranchised. 

It was during WWII when the Germans occupied France that she fell in with a group of writers and actors and developed an interest

in acting.   She first got some bit parts in movies in the early 40s.  She took her mother's maiden name as her own to hide her Jewish roots.

She married director Yves Allegret in 1948 (there are conflicting dates for this marriage).  They had a daughter Catherine two years earlier while he was still married to another woman.  The girl would grow up to be actress Catherine Allegret.

Her first significant film La Ronde (1950), was a sumptuous series of 10 vignettes with sexually-explicit content revolving around interconnected love.  It was extremely popular.  Her sensuous face (heavily-lidded eyes, full lips) and throaty voice helped catapult her to great fame in France and around Europe.  The film had been banned briefly in the States due to being immoral.

She divorced Allegret in the beginning of 1951 and by the end of the year married the Italian-born French singer Yves Montand, a marriage that would last until her death.  Due to another husband with the first name of Yves, she always called husband #2 Montand.

Her fame grew more when she made Diabolique (1955), in which she played a schoolmaster's icily-scheming, murdering mistress.  It is a particularly nasty piece of business that audiences flocked to.  It was that rare (at the time) foreign language film that was distributed in the U.S. and Britain.

The Montands were a very politically left-leaning couple.  Each had been quite vocal about politics before meeting one another and became more so after marrying.  They were both accused of being communists for a time and he may have been but while she flirted around the edges, she never joined.  Europe was, by and large, supportive of their efforts but they were vilified in the U.S. which denied visas to both of them.

Politically they were simpatico with playwright Arthur Miller when they appeared on the stage in his The Crucible and in 1957 the film version.  A couple of years later the Montands' relationship with Miller would take on a different hue.  This was the first of the couple's six films together.  They would also work together countless times in plays, documentaries and on the stage.

Her exquisite portrayal of a woman clutching at her last chance for happiness with a cad (a superb Laurence Harvey) in Room at the Top (1959) made her internationally famous and won her many awards across the world including the Oscar.  Her win was a first... a foreign actress had never received a best actress Oscar without making a single American film.  (That, by the way, didn't happen again until 40 years later when another Frenchwoman accomplished the same thing... Marion Cotillard in La Vie En Rose.)    As a result of her work in this film, Signoret received offers for work in the States but she declined most everything because she preferred to work in France and England and she said that she was too lazy.

She met Jane Fonda in the early 60s when Fonda was living outside Paris.  The younger actress considers Signoret the person who got her interested in politics.

Paul B, notice the smile?

Also in the early 60s she turned down the role of a shrink opposite Elvis Presley in Wild in the Country.  What was she thinking?  Did she want to be a serious actress or what?!?!  Apparently now that she was an Oscar winner, she was acceptable for that visa.  The truth has more to do with Montand who wanted to sing in New York supper clubs and oh yes, 20th Century Fox had offered him a movie role.

He would costar with Marilyn Monroe in Let's Make Love (1960).  The two couples (including MM's husband, Arthur Miller) had suites across from one another at the Beverly Hills Hotel.  The four got together for cook-ins and late-night chats.   Signoret and Miller improved on their earlier acquaintance, realizing they were politically similar and both great intellectuals.  After he returned to Connecticut and she to Paris, Montand and Monroe engaged in a very messy, public affair.  

Montand had just come out of a funk concerning MM's unprofessionalism, particularly her lateness and no-shows.  But when she walked across the hall at the hotel and knocked on his door, nude under a mink coat, well, gosh, what's a horny Frenchman supposed to do?   The hell with the wife who loved him.  Where the hell was she anyway?

Who looks the least happy?

Day by day there was newspaper and trade magazine coverage of their audacious behavior.  At first they denied it, of course, but then she would say such things as she was crazy about Montand because he looked so much like DiMaggio.   If either of them was asked what about your spouse, they would profess undying love and sadness about missing them.   Montand would go on record with hey, I'm French.  What he was was a pig.

Around this time Signoret began receiving much criticism for her fading looks.  She had gained weight.  Her face became rather jowly and if she suffered privately over the burden of her flesh, she acted as though it didn't bother her at all.  She said at the time I got old the way women who are not actresses grow old. 

I suspect a lot of it had to do with Montand's serial cheating and particularly the worldwide attention to his public affair with MM.  The thing that was different about this affair over all others was he hadn't kept it private and didn't seem to care.  People certainly questioned why Signoret didn't divorce him but that road was apparently one she didn't care to take.  One road she did take was to make a phone call to MM.  Signoret always said she enjoyed the blonde bombshell, calling her a beautiful peasant (which fascinates me).  It's said she begged MM to stop seeing Montand.

He said around this time I think a man can have two, maybe three, affairs while he is married.  But three is the absolute maximum.  After that, he's cheating.  That would be a real knee-slapper if true but it was a lie.  There would one day be accusations by a family member that he abused her from an early age.  

They were a passionate duo, armed as they were with their shared love of acting, including his for singing and her swooning when he did) and their sworn pledge to honor their political lives.  That was indeed powerful stuff but is it all that kept the marriage together?  They both always admitted that they argued endlessly through their nearly 34-year marriage.  I suspect it had largely become a marriage of convenience.  His famous marriage allowed him to keep his affairs as affairs and he could have many of them.  He'd kept his romantic looks and beautiful young women wanted to sleep with him after he sang a love song to them.   She had to know that it had become life with a cheating husband or a life alone and she didn't want the latter.  In the beginning she was over the moon about him.  She could hardly believe her good fortune.  Maybe that never changed.   

She liked causes and was not one to give up.  Maybe Montand and the marriage became such a cause. 

Or hey, maybe it's all just too American of an explanation.  They were French, after all, and I laugh as I recall times being in debates/arguments with French friends or coworkers and in trying to get somewhere, on some common ground, I hear hey, I'm French.  I'll let that be the final word.   

Signoret disliked making Term of Trial (1962) with Olivier, Sarah Miles and Terence Stamp.   It concerns a British teen whose advances toward her alcoholic English teacher are spurned so she tells the police that he made the moves.  Signoret plays his unhappy wife.

The Day and the Hour (1963), with Stuart Whitman, Geneviéve Page and Michel Piccoli, must have been near and dear to Signoret's heart.  It concerns a Frenchwoman who aids two downed Allied pilots to avoid capture by the Nazis in WWII France.  The first two-thirds, getting out of the country, is a decent adventure-thriller.  It is unknown today. 

In 1964 she began filming her role as the old whore in Zorba the Greek opposite Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates but a week or two into filming, she quit, saying the role wasn't right for her.  Russian actress Lila Kedrova assumed the part and won an Oscar for doing so.

Signoret received another Oscar nomination for her superb turn as a doomed Spanish countess in the star-laden Ship of Fools (1965).  There was an earlier review.  Since doing that piece I have read a review that New York critic Bosley Crowther wrote about her and her shipboard lover, Oscar Werner, as the ship's doctor, that impressed me.  He loved the bond they formed... so tender, understanding and sad between the two frustrated creatures of an obsolescent breed, a fading demonstration of human dignity and despair.

She befriended Vivien Leigh on set of Ship of Fools

She was pleased to work with director Costa-Gavras in The Sleeping Car Murder (1965) partly because she costarring with her husband, her daughter and several friends.  She plays a phony actress who, along with other passengers, witnesses a murder on a train and must take matters into their own hands if they want to survive.  

Is Paris Burning? (1966) is a would-be epic about several French Resistance groups trying to regain control of Paris at the end of WWII.  It was an ambitious project that wasn't what it could or should have been because of the serious meddling of Charles de Gaulle.  The subject matter, of course, got both Signoret's and Montand's attention along with Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Leslie Caron, Daniel Gélin (a former Signoret lover), Claude Dauphin and Jean-Louis Trintignant.  From America came Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Robert Stack, Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles and George Chakiris.

The Deadly Affair (1967) is an early John le Carré Cold War spy drama depicting life for a concentration camp survivor living in a London suburb.  I liked it more than some of his more famous work which is chiefly due to Sidney Lumet's usual stunning direction and the luminous performances of Signoret and James Mason.

Games (1967) is one of the few American movies Signoret ever did and it certainly wasn't as ballyhooed as some of her other work and yet it had a sinister charm that I found appealing.  A young, prosperous, married couple (Katharine Ross and James Caan) has a love of playing games, to include pranking, and of course it gets out of hand.  Signoret plays a woman who mysteriously enters their lives in a provocative way.  It did not do well at the box office.

She wouldn't go away... in Games

She and Mason and Lumet so enjoyed working together on The Deadly Affair that they decided to do it one more time and Chekhov's The Seagull (1968) became that project.  Interpreting this writer's work was never much fun for me.  Always too heavy-handed.   If I liked the film, it is certainly because of three glowing performances... Signoret, Mason and Vanessa Redgrave.  Had it starred unknowns, I probably would have overdosed on Milk Duds.  It, too, died at the box office.

While Signoret continued to have successful films in France, she hadn't had an international hit since Room at the Top.  One thing that remain intact was her sterling reputation as an actress.  It was generally thought that her appearance was the real culprit.  She was now a character actress and those choice starring roles in topnotch projects was a thing of the past.

After making his third movie with Signoret, actor Philippe Noiret publicly commented:  It was quite an experience because she is a fabulous actress, because she knows absolutely everything about making movies, about what an actor can do on the screen.  It's a real challenge having someone like that in front of you.  But she is quite hard to work with because she wants to be the head of everything and you have to remain very alert because otherwise she might just manage to devour you.

I barely heard of her in the last eight years of her life.  One film that did attract some good notices was Madame Rosa (1977) where she plays a weary ex-madam who is foster mom to other prostitutes' children. It won Oscar's best foreign film.

She wrote her memoirs in 1978, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be,  with her usual candor.  In 1985 she wrote a popular novel, Adieu, Volodia, about a group of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Russia and their children working in the theater/film industry during the years 1926-45.  

She had been ill for several years when she died at her country house in Normandy on September 30, 1985, age 64 of pancreatic cancer.

It was a time of great sadness in France.

The French tributes poured in.  President Francois Mitterrand said during more than 40 years she has spoken to the hearts of the French people.  In the same vein, Prime Minister Laurent Fabius said a voice of warmth, a voice that spoke to every one of us for the defense of rights and liberty for all, is silent.  He also referred to her as a great woman in the history of cinema and of literature.

Jack Lang, the Minister of Culture, acknowledged that Signoret embodied to perfection all those who fight to the end for all the desperate causes.  In films as well as in life she was an unshakable militant, in the front rank of all the battles for human rights, under all regimes and all horizons.  It was faith that sustained her, faith in her ideals of liberty and progress.

Her daughter said she fought until the end.  She died as she lived... with courage.  

Next posting:

Honoring a request

(the first of two)