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Simone Simon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Simone Simon | |
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| Birth name | Simone Thérèse Fernande Simon |
| Born | April 23, 1910 Béthune, Pas-de-Calais, France |
| Died | February 22, 2005, aged 94 Paris, France |
| Notable roles | Irina Dubrovna in Cat People, 1942 Séverine Roubaud in La Bête Humaine, 1938 |
Simone Simon (April 23, 1910 – February 22, 2005) was a French film actress who began her film career in 1931.
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Simone Simon Pas-de-Calais, France. She was the daughter of Henri Louis Firmin, a French engineer, and Erma Maria Domenica Giorcelli, an Italian housewife. She grew up in Marseille.
She went to Paris in 1931 and worked briefly as a singer, model and fashion designer.
Simon made her screen debut in Le Chanteur inconnu ("The Unknown Singer", 1931). She quickly established herself as one of the country's most successful film actresses. After seeing her in the 1934 film Lac Aux Dames (USA title: Ladies' Lake), Darryl F. Zanuck brought her to Hollywood in 1936 with a widespread publicity campaign.
However her films for 20th Century Fox were only moderately successful. Among others, she was cast in the Janet Gaynor role in a remake of the beloved silent classic Seventh Heaven, which co-starred James Stewart and flopped. She also appeared as an eager child/woman in Ladies in Love, which starred Gaynor, Constance Bennett, and Loretta Young, a heavyweight lineup in which Simon's role left her little chance to effectively compete. Simon returned, dissatisfied, to France. There she appeared in the film La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast) in 1938.
With the outbreak of World War II she returned to Hollywood and RKO Studios where she achieved her greatest successes in English language cinema with The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), and the horror films Cat People (1942) and The Curse of the Cat People (1944).
These films, however, did not lead to greater success and she languished in mediocre films until the end of the war.
She returned to France to act, and appeared in La Ronde (1950). Her film roles were few after this and she made her final film appearance in 1973.
She died in Paris, France on 22 February 2005, aged 94, from natural causes. The BBC[1] mistakenly reported her age as 93, by using the wrong year of birth (1911).
- A few days later 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."[2]
- She never married but had numerous intimate relationships with fellow actors or musicians, among others. Her maid revealed that she gave a gold key to her boudoir to any man she was interested in, including George Gershwin.
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