Fantomas 1947
Giorgio Aguilar
Moved to Paris with her family while still a child; eventually forced to work as a typist to support family when the Nazis invaded Paris and her Jewish father fled to London; after several years working as an extra in films, was given her first leading role (1947), beginning her career as a versatile and accomplished character actress of the French screen; won international recognition; received Academy Award as Best Actress for Room at the Top (1958); published two volumes of memoirs and a novel.
They were an odd pair and it was an odd meeting place for a first date that March night in 1941. He was a political revolutionary from a wealthy, conservative Swiss family; she was the daughter of a Jewish father and worked as a secretary for a Paris newspaper well known as a mouthpiece for the occupying Germans; and the place chosen for their meeting was the Left Bank's Caf de Flore, that bastion of anti-Nazi, anti-fascist intellectuals and artists on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, as yet untouched by the occupation forces roaming the capital. For Claude Jaeger, the evening marked the beginning of his work as an elusive leader of the Resistance movement; for Simone Kaminker, stepping into the Flore that evening was the start of a career in which politics and art would be inextricably bound. "By opening that door," she later said, after adopting her mother's maiden name and becoming Simone Signoret, "I was entering a world that would change the rest of my life."
Although Simone harbored a young girl's fantasies of becoming a famous actress, it seemed her future would be dedicated to more serious pursuits. She studied philosophy in secondary school, helped form a student magazine dedicated to philosophical issues called "The Hyphen," and met a young philosophy professor named Jean-Paul Sartre, who had come to teach at the boys' school across the street. During his daughter's school years, Andr found work as a translator and interpreter and was disturbed by the content of a speech carried live by French radio that he was assigned to translate. It was Adolf Hitler's Nuremberg speech of 1934, the first major policy statement by the Nazi leader. Not long after, Andr nervously sent his wife and children to Vannes, in the French countryside, and left France for London, where he served as a translator for the BBC and remained for the duration of the war. Cut off from Paris by the German invasion of 1939, Simone spent the first year of the war helping her mother feed and billet the German soldiers passing through on their way to the capital who winked knowingly at Georgette's claim that the family name was a Breton one. Georgette and her two sons finally returned to Neuilly during the winter of 1940 while Simone finished her education at the Vannes lyce, taking her baccalaurate (the French equivalent of a bachelor's degree) in philosophy.
Georgette's struggle to raise three children on her meager income as a seamstress forced Simone to find work in occupied Paris as a secretary for a collaborationist newspaper, Les Nouveaux Temps, which was owned by the father of a school friend. It was at this point that she met Claude Jaeger and walked into the Caf de Flore that March night. There, while German troops roamed the city, she met intellectuals and artists who, like herself, turned their disaffections and anxieties into philosophical tracts, poetry, painting, plays, and films. She renewed her acquaintance with Sartre, just then codifying his thinking into what would be called Existentialism, struck up a friendship with Simone de Beauvoir , and met such luminaries of the French art world as Picasso, Giacometti, and Soutine. She heard the rebellious talk of Communists, Italian anti-fascists, Spanish republicans, and fearful Jews. Although her relationship with Jaeger soon ended, and Simone never actively joined the French Resistance, the political activism that would mark her later life was first nurtured by the relationships formed at the Flore, many of which lasted for the rest of her days. As the first sign of her new direction, she quit her job at Les Nouveaux Temps, telling her employer that she was leaving "because you see, monsieur, you'll all end up being shot." (An accurate prediction, as it turned out: the editor of the paper was executed for treason after the war.) An apartment she shared with Yves Allegret, a young film director she met at the Flore, was an active message center for Resistance activities; and Signoret once discovered that a suitcase she had been asked to deliver for a friend contained ammunition bound for Resistance fighters just outside Paris. "I did not perform a single heroic act," Signoret admitted, "but I did no harm, which in itself is not so bad."
Dmons de l'Aube marked Simone's acceptance as a serious actress, bolstered by her performance as a hard-hearted streetwalker changed by the power of love in 1948's Dde d'Anvers, also directed by Allegret, and in that same year's Impasse des Deux Anges. "Simone Signoret has finally found the part she was looking for," Paris-Presse told its readers, "which immediately raises her up with the first rank of French screen actresses." Le Figaro was particularly impressed with her ability to silently communicate emotion. "Her silences are as important as her words," the newspaper said. "She acts with her mouth, her eyes, and her skin." Audiences fell in love with the character of Dde, and were particularly struck by Signoret's dazzling, almost regal beauty and smoldering sensuality, "glowing like a greengage," as one reviewer put it. But Signoret was more concerned with developing a convincing character and went to great lengths with makeup and wardrobe to help her with the transition. "It's almost chemical, the way you turn into that other person," she once observed. "I forget that I'm Signoret." Filmgoers were so attached to Dde that Simone's work as the manipulative, greedy Dora in 1950's Manges (also directed by Allegret) brought howls of protest, even after Signoret defended herself by claiming that it was a film's message as a whole that was important to her, not merely her own character. "I can easily play a Gestapo informer in an anti-fascist film," she said, "but I can't play a model mother or a proud mistress in a fascist film." Among Signoret's other films during the immediate postwar period were the first of many pictures dealing with wartime heroism, 1948's Against The Wind, a British film in which Signoret played a French Resistance fighter aided by British paratroopers.
In the swirl of ideological accusation and recrimination, Signoret's career seemed to grind to a halt. She was caught between her political detractors, who considered her a dangerous leftist, and young French directors like Franois Truffaut, Louis Malle and their New Wave comrades, who avoided her as an icon of the old rgime they were seeking to undermine with their brash new style of filmmaking. "The future belongs to very young girls and pretty young woman," Signoret lamented, even though she was only in her 40s at the time. A further blow was struck in 1958 when her younger brother, Alain, a promising director in his own right, drowned while shooting a documentary about the French fishing industry.
It was an offer of work in a British film that helped her recover from her brother's death and, at the same time, resuscitate her career. Room at the Top, shot in 1958, brought with it international acclaim and an end to Signoret's screen reputation as a hard-hearted mistress or a street-walker. Her portrayal of Alice Aisgill, the vulnerable French housewife who indulges in an illfated affair with a younger man in a dreary Yorkshire industrial town, is generally considered to mark the peak of her career. Room at the Top was one of the top-grossing pictures of the late 1950s in nearly every Western country except, ironically, France, where film audiences were perhaps less fascinated with stories of adulterous amours. The film was released just as Signoret was traveling to America (on a restricted visa) with Montand, who had been signed for a one-man Broadway show. By the time they arrived in New York, Signoret's fame had grown to such proportions that she feared she might overshadow her husband whom, she worried, "people might take for an actress' husband." But Montand's Broadway debut was equally acclaimed, making the two of them the darlings of the international jet set and sending the couple to a newly liberalized Hollywood, which handed Signoret its Best Actress award for Room at the Top and offered Montand a contract for two pictures, one of which was George Cukor's Let's Make Love. The scandalous publicity surrounding Montand's brief affair with co-star Marilyn Monroe hit the trade press in the middle of shooting, but Signoret knew her marriage to Montand was strong enough to survive the incident, although she was less sure about Monroe's marriage to Arthur Miller. Maintaining a calm demeanor amid the furor, she answered one reporter's question by inquiring politely, "You know many men, do you, who would have stayed indifferent while having Marilyn Monroe in their arms?" Many years later, she wrote, "[Monroe] will never know how much I didn't hate her, and how I understand the story, which only concerned the four of us." Besides, there was much to otherwise occupy her attention at the time, chiefly the news that she had won the Best Actress award from both the British Film Association and the Cannes Film Festival for her work in Room at the Top.
Her willingness to use her age as a catalyst for her acting produced a stunning performance in 1977's La Vie devant soi (released with English subtitles as Madame Rosa), her riveting portrayal of an aging Holocaust survivor who also happens to be the good-hearted madam of a brothel. As careful with her wardrobe and makeup at 56 as she had been at 18, Simone wore a gaudy flowered housedress several sizes too small to make her look grossly obese and, more subtly, had a concentration camp number borrowed from her makeup artist (an actual survivor of the camps) inked onto her arm. The number is never seen in the film, covered by wardrobe, but Signoret's meticulous attention to characterization demanded it be placed there.
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