Simone Simon; excellent Independent obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
to refrain from smirking about her frank sexuality. It
actually concentrates on her *work*. Imagine that.
Kittenish star well cast in 'Cat People'
02 March 2005
Simone Simon, actress: born Béthune, France 23 April 1910;
died Paris 23 February 2005.
Simone Simon was a delightfully kittenish actress, whose
triangular face and gamine figure were often called feline,
an appropriate description of an actress whose most famous
American film was the classic Val Lewton production Cat
People. In her native France, she worked with some of the
finest directors, including Renoir and Ophuls, in such films
as La Bête humaine, La Ronde and Le Plaisir, and, in the
perception of her as a "sex kitten", she could be described
as a precursor of Brigitte Bardot.
Born in 1910 (or 1911) in Béthune, France, the daughter of a
French engineer and an Italian housewife, she grew up in
Marseilles. She worked briefly as a singer, model and
fashion designer in Paris before making her screen début in
Le Chanteur inconnu ("The Unknown Singer", 1931).
She achieved prominence with her role opposite Jean-Pierre
Aumont in Marc Allégret's lightweight but delicately handled
Tyrolean romance Lac aux dames (Ladies Lake, 1934), adapted
by Colette from Vicki Baum's novel. The film made stars of
both Simon and her leading man, and shortly afterwards she
was offered a Hollywood contract by Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th
Century-Fox, although, as often happened with continental
leading ladies, the studio seemed unsure what to do with
her.
Her first American film, Girls' Dormitory (1936), is
remembered now mainly as Tyrone Power's first speaking part.
He had just one line, "Can I have this dance?", addressed to
Simon in the final scene, but it provoked such a response
from the public that he was propelled to instant stardom.
Simon also made an impression, the New York Times critic
Frank Nugent suggesting "that Congress cancel a substantial
part of France's war debt in consideration of its gift of
her to Hollywood".
She was one of four girls finding romance in Budapest in
Ladies in Love (1936), which had one of the studio's
favourite themes - working girls hiring a lavish apartment
to make an impression on boyfriends. A minor comedy, Love
and Hisses (1937), was followed by her best role from this
period, as the tragic waif of Seventh Heaven (1937),
although her leading man, James Stewart, hardly made a
convincing Parisian sewer worker, and the film was judged
inferior to the 1927 silent version with Janet Gaynor and
Charles Farrell.
After Allan Dwan's amusing but slight comedy Josette (1938),
Simon returned to France and made one of her finest films,
Renoir's La Bête humaine (1938) co-starring Jean Gabin. An
updated version of Zola's 1890 novel, it was part of the
"poetic realism" cycle of sombre romances that especially
characterised the work of Marcel Carné and Julien Duvivier
in the 1930s. Its emotionally charged tale, of a train
driver who falls in love with the wife of a railwayman that
the couple plan to kill, was exquisitely directed,
beautifully played by the coquettish Simon and brooding
Gabin, and was a huge hit.
Hollywood beckoned again, and she returned with a bewitching
portrayal of an unearthly seductress in William Dieterle's
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), an adaptation of
Stephen Vincent Benét's fable about a simple farmer who
sells his soul to the devil. Simon later confessed she
thought the piece "too heavy-handed".
She was then cast in the film for which she is best
remembered, as the tragic heroine who turns into a cat when
jealous, in Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942). One of the
most intelligent and haunting of "B" movies, with two
sequences, one set in a swimming pool and the other in a
deserted street, that are among the most eerily disturbing
ever put on film, it has deservedly become a classic, and
was so popular in its day that, despite its brief running
time (73 minutes), it often played as the prime attraction.
Declassified records, which became available at the UK
Public Records Office in 2002, revealed that during 1942
Simon was watched by the FBI, because she was dating Dusko
Popov, a "double agent" who worked for MI5. She gave him a
loan of £10,000 late in 1942, before he left for Lisbon, and
the couple broke up in 1943, with Simon apparently not
recovering the loan.
After the great success of Cat People, its producer Lewton
was asked to do a sequel with the title The Curse of the Cat
People (1944). He eschewed the obvious and with the director
Robert Wise made a gripping psychological thriller about a
lonely child, with Simon (whose character had died at the
end of the previous film) appearing as a friendly spirit.
Lewton and Wise had less success with Mademoiselle Fifi
(1944), although Simon was agreeably spunky as the brave
French laundress of Guy de Maupassant's story, defying the
Prussian invaders of 1870. She later claimed that US
censorship harmed the film.
Her other movies in the US were minor, and at the end of the
Second World War she returned to Paris, where she made her
stage début in Le Square du Pérou ("Peru Square", 1945). In
1947, she journeyed to the UK to star opposite Robert Newton
in Lance Comfort's powerful Temptation Harbour (1947).
Adapted from a story by Georges Simenon, it evoked La Bête
humaine in its downbeat tale of a railway worker and a
gold-digger.
In France, Simon's work was sporadic but included three
notable movies. She and Edwige Feuillère were owners of an
1880s girls' boarding school in Jacqueline Audry's
controversial Olivia (1950, aka The Pit of Loneliness),
which had censor boards outraged at its portrayal of
lesbianism. The same year, she was one of several stars in
Max Ophuls's witty version of Arthur Schnitzler's play
depicting love as a bitterly comic merry-go-round, La Ronde,
which won the British Film Academy's Best Film award.
In 1952 she made a second film with Ophuls, Le Plaisir,
based on three stories by Maupassant. In the third episode,
"La Modèle", she was the lovesick model of a philandering
artist (Daniel Gelin). When a suicide attempt leaves her
crippled, he marries her out of pity, and in the haunting
last shot is seen wheeling her along the beach. She returned
to the stage in La Courte paille ("The Short Straw", 1967)
and made her last film, La Femme en bleu ("The Woman in
Blue"), in 1973.
Tom Vallance