Word: signoret
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...French occupation force, she grew up in the affluent Paris suburb of Neuilly. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, her father, a Jew, fled to Britain to join Charles de Gaulle's Free French army. Simone remained in France with her family, adopting her mother's maiden name --Signoret--to escape detection by the Nazis, and worked as a secretary for the Paris daily Les Nouveaux Temps...
...Film Academy award for her portrayal of a free spirit, and Room at the Top (1959), for which she was awarded the Oscar for best actress, in the sensitively played role of a woman who was jilted by an ambitious younger lover. By then, at the age of 37, Signoret had reached a turning point in her professional life. "That is a difficult age for an actress," she recalled in an interview in 1978. "It means that when she is still pretty good-looking, she must decide that interesting parts are going to be on the other side...
Through the 1960s and '70s, as chain-smoking and drinking took their toll on her health, Signoret was increasingly cast as a gutsy, worldly older woman. Probably her best performance of the period was in Moshe Mizrahi's 1977 film, La Vie Devant Soi (Madame Rosa in English), in which she played a Jewish ex- prostitute and survivor of a concentration camp. The theme of Jewish life in France was also the subject of her best-selling novel, Adieu, Volodia, which appeared this year. She had previously published two memoirs, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used...
...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...
...enthusiasm that the couple shared throughout their marriage was left-wing politics. Although they never joined the Communist Party, Signoret and Montand were considered two of France's best-known fellow travelers until the Soviets' 1956 invasion of Hungary dashed their faith in the Soviet Union as the wave of the future. They never wavered in their support for human-rights causes, however. Signoret was most recently active on behalf of the "SOS- Racisme" antiracist movement in France. But as she put it last spring, "I have crossed the border into antiCommunism." Summing up her career, Author Max Gallo wrote...