Word: montand
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Signoret's autobiographical works filled in the details of a personal life whose outlines were already well known. Divorced from Director Yves Allegret in l949, she married Actor-Singer Yves Montand two years later. Despite Montand's well-publicized fling with Marilyn Monroe in 1960, the couple were together for 36 years. "I love her more than ever today," Montand told an interviewer in 1972, "because she is a woman of extraordinary vitality and enthusiasm...
...Summers devotes most of his book to relatively unpublicized griefs, including a dozen abortions, several suicide attempts, and inconclusive liaisons with scores of men, from anonymous pickups to Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and Yves Montand. With the help of some 600 new interviews, Summers proposes but does not prove several dark scenarios, including the destruction of records linking Marilyn with her last lover, Robert Kennedy. Ultimately, Goddess portrays a born victim, an essentially simple soul far out of her depth. Her psychiatrist tells it all in one sentence. The day of her death, Marilyn "expressed considerable dissatisfaction that here...
...show that runs without intermission, only once is he offstage. And even then his image is on: a giant screen descends, and in a skit written by Simone Signoret, Montand dictates to an unseen and unfeeling telephone operator a telegram of love to his mistress. The dialogue is hilarious, a reminder that Montand, the chanteur extraordinaire, is also a gifted actor and comedian, the star of such films as The Wages of Fear, Z and La Guerre Est Finie...
That acting ability, in fact, is what makes Montand such a magnetic singer. His voice is superb, of course, as mellow and true as a bass viol; at 60, he sounds just as good as he did 20 or 30 years ago. But the soul of a Montand song is not just in his voice, it is in his lithe, dancer's body, his mobile face, and his articulate, talkative hands and fingers. The soul is also in the lyrics themselves, and Montand's elegant and inimitable phrasing. The pity, it must be added, is that so much...
Another pity, both in New York and the six other American and Canadian cities Montand will visit on his six-week tour, is that he is booked into such huge theaters. The Metropolitan, for example, seats about 4,000; the Olympia in Paris, where Montand is accustomed to playing, holds only 2,100. The Metropolitan Opera House was designed for grand opera, not intimacy and even Montand's considerable charm is not large enough to fill it, or the other vast halls he will be playing...