Simone signoret - wikipedia

In the 1940s the “thinking man’s sex symbol” started work as an extra in French films. (She took her mother’s name in the early 1940s to avoid Nazi scrutiny when she began working in films.) Her stunning beauty attracted the attention of director Yves Allégret, who became her husband (1948–1949) and the father of her only child, her daughter Catherine. It was in one of Allégret’s films, Dédée d’Anvers (1948), that Signoret produced her signature role of the “prostitute with a heart of gold,” lending a subtlety and depth to the performance that transformed the cliché into an enduring icon. Signoret provided ever more complex variants of this role as she matured, creating heroines noted for their strength and independence while retaining the dazzling sensuality associated with her screen personae.

Two years after Dédée, Signoret played a more vicious version of her character as the scheming shrew in Allégret’s Manèges (1950), but she had already divorced him and become involved with the great love of her life, Yves Montand, to whom she remained married until her death in 1985 (“Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. That is what makes a marriage last—more than passion or even sex!” [Nostalgia]). Montand adopted her daughter Catherine immediately, and by the time Signoret wrote her autobiography in 1978, the family unit of Montand-Signoret, Catherine, and Catherine’s son Benjamin was the unassailable core of the actress’s life.

From 1950 to 1955 Signoret created the roles with which she is most identified in the early stage of her career, a moody, sensual, scintillating presence that made her first a national and then an international symbol: La Ronde (Max Ophuls, 1950), Thérèse Raquin (Marcel Carné, 1953), Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955), and Casque d’Ôr (Jacques Becker, 1952). The latter film not only established Signoret as an actress of range and complexity, but also galvanized her career as a first-rate star; it remained her favorite rôle, along with Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1958, for which she received an Oscar). Room at the Top marked the next phase of Signoret’s career and truly launched her on the international scene; she was honored as Best Actress by both British and American film academies and by the Cannes Film Festival for her role as Alice Aisgill, an aging, unhappily married woman who believes she has found true love. Signoret gave all of her scenes (not only the sexual ones) a depth and passion that gave the film itself, a modest production of the British cinema, the status of high art.