Simone Simon
Simone Simon, the star of Cat People and La Bête humaine, died of undisclosed causes in Paris on the night of February 22, according to an announcement made by her family. She was 94.
Yesterday, French Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres issued a statement in which he extolled Simon’s “charm, her irresistible smile. … With Simone Simon’s passing, we have lost one of the most seductive and most brilliant stars of the French cinema of the first half of the 20th century.”
The film career of pretty, kittenish Simone Simon spanned more than four decades, from the early 1930s to the early 1970s, during which time she appeared in nearly 40 motion pictures in France, Italy, Germany, Britain, and Hollywood for directors such as Jean Renoir, Jacques Tourneur, Max Ophüls, William Dieterle, and Marc Allégret, and opposite the likes of Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jean Gabin, Walter Huston, Herbert Marshall, Michel Simon, and Claude Dauphin.
Simon is chiefly remembered today for two films, in both of which she plays a woman doomed by her emotions and desires: Renoir’s film noir La Bête humaine / The Human Beast (1938) and Tourneur’s cult horror classic Cat People (1942).
Simone Simon was born on April 23, 1910 (some sources have 1911), to a French father and an Italian mother in Béthune, a small town in the Pas de Calais province near the Belgian border. (Some sources state that Simon was born in Marseilles). Her parents’ marriage didn’t last very long after her birth, and at the age of three Simone moved to Madagascar, where her mother’s new husband managed a graphite mine. She spent her formative years there (and possibly in Marseilles), and later attended schools in Berlin, Budapest, and Turin. While still a teenager, she began modeling and acting onstage, mostly in musicals.
As the story goes, in 1931 the 21-year-old Simon was drinking coffee on the terrace of the Café de la Paix in Paris when she was discovered by exiled Russian director Victor Tourjansky, who cast her in Le Chanteur inconnu / The Unknown Singer (1931), starring opera singer Lucien Muratore. By the time Tourjansky and Simon worked together again, in Les Yeux noirs / Dark Eyes in 1935 (Jean-Pierre Aumont was the leading man), Simon had already established herself as a popular young player in the French film industry.
Publicity dubbed her “La Sauvage Tendre,” a label that must have appealed to 20th Century-Fox talent scouts. Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck had Simon shipped to Hollywood — billed as “Europe’s Sweetheart” — to star in a series of films for the studio. The Fox publicity department taught Americans to pronounce her name “See-moan See-moan,” but the studio was having problems teaching the Tender Savage to speak proper English.
Simone Simon, James Stewart in Seventh Heaven
An even bigger problem was that Fox’s vehicles for Simon, who was expected to become a big Hollywood star, failed to show her to best advantage. She lost the role of Cigarette in Under Two Flags (1936) to Claudette Colbert, and found herself cast instead in smaller productions such as Girls’ Dormitory (1936), competing with Ruth Chatterton for the attentions of Herbert Marshall; Ladies in Love (1936), fourth-billed after Janet Gaynor, Loretta Young, and Constance Bennett; and a weak remake of Seventh Heaven (1937), in the old Janet Gaynor role as a Parisian street urchin romancing a pathetically miscast James Stewart.
Simon bravely pouted her way through these films, but to no avail. Another publicity gimmick, “Simone Simon Sings Sings” didn’t help matters any, especially since the sing-singing was performed in B-fare like Love and Hisses (1937), with Bert Lahr, and Josette (1938), opposite Don Ameche.
In fact, Simon’s film appearances were of less interest than her private life, which garnered loads of (unwanted) publicity when she accused her secretary of forging checks, and the accused in turn divulged naughty details about Simon’s private affairs. Among those was the actress’ alleged habit of showering her male friends with gifts, including gold keys to her home.
(Future blacklisted composer Larry Adler recalled going on a date at Simon’s home only to share her company with fellow Simon admirer George Gershwin. Sometime during the course of the evening, a pair of Fox sound technicians joined the trio. They had conveniently brought along a recording machine, which was then used to record Gershwin playing the piano, Adler the mouth organ, and Simon sing-singing songs from Porgy and Bess.)
With her Hollywood career stalled and now facing competition at Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power’s wife), Simon went back to France. There, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir’s moody La Bête humaine.
Jean Gabin, Simone Simon in La Bête humaine
Based on Emile Zola’s novel, La Bête humaine exudes a dark, fatalistic sensibility that was quite common in pre-World War II French pictures: In a gloomy railway station, the child-like siren Simon would rather spend her time with a virile engineer (Jean Gabin) than with her unattractive (and murderous) station master husband (Fernand Ledoux). She tries to lure the engineer into killing the husband, but ends up being murdered herself. “Her Séverine was unforgettable,” Renoir would later say.
Renoir also wanted Simon for the leading female role in what was to become his masterwork, La Règle du jeu / The Rules of the Game (1939), but he couldn’t meet her salary demands. Eventually, the director (who was also the film’s producer) opted for the less expensive — and considerably less saucy — Nora Gregor.
After war broke out, Simon returned to the United States. Her second Hollywood foray was a tad happier, as she was offered two more memorable roles — in both of which sex, once again, played an important part: Belle, the devil’s handmaiden in William Dieterle’s slow-moving All That Money Can Buy / The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), starring Walter Huston and James Craig; and the sexually repressed Irena Dubrovna, a woman who believes she turns into a panther whenever she gets emotionally stirred up, in Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (right), one of several low-budget (but generally respected) horror films produced by Val Lewton for RKO.
There followed a few minor films, the most distinguished of which were Mademoiselle Fifi (1944), a Lewton production directed by Robert Wise from a Guy de Maupassant story, and a weak “sequel” to Cat People, Curse of the Cat People (1944), which Wise co-directed. In the second Cat People film, which despite its title is just a poorly scripted children’s fantasy story, Simon has a brief role as Irena’s ghost.
Serge Reggiani, Simone Simon in La Ronde
With the war over, Simon traveled back to France. She made 11 more films, including Jacqueline Audry’s Olivia / The Pit of Loneliness (1950), opposite stage and screen veteran Edwige Feuillère, and two all-star vehicles for German director Max Ophüls: the delightful La Ronde (1950), in one of the episodes, as a maid; and Le Plaisir (1952), co-starring with Jean Servais in the segment “Le Modèle,” one of the film’s three tales by de Maupassant.
Following the British comedy The Extra Day in 1956, Simon retired from films but continued working onstage. In 1973, she made a brief comeback in Michel Deville’s La Femme en bleu / The Woman in Blue, her final film.
Simone Simon never married, but was reportedly linked to a married French millionaire.
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Tags: All That Money Can Buy, Cat People, Jacques Tourneur, Jean Gabin, Jean Renoir, La Bête humaine, La Ronde, Le Plaisir, Seventh Heaven, Simone Simon
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