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Simone Signoret: Free French
built 192 days ago
Worth seeing just for French actress Simone Signoret’s Oscar-winning performance, it’s a powerhouse British tragedy about class, money and power, and how sex, which is used to get them, traps the user. --Alexander Payne
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During the German occupation of France, Signoret formed close bonds with an artistic group of writers and actors who met at a café in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter, Café de Flore. By this time, she had developed an interest in acting and was encouraged by her friends, including her lover, Daniel Gélin, to follow her ambition. In 1942, she began appearing in bit parts and was able to earn enough money to support her mother and two brothers as her father, who was a French patriot, had fled the country in 1940 to join General De Gaulle in England. She took her mother's maiden name for the screen to help hide her Jewish roots.
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During this period, Simone became a vocal civil rights campaigner, penning the protest song "Mississippi Goddam," written after the 1963 murders of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and four black schoolgirls in an Alabama church bombing. She ... wrote "The King of Love Is Dead" as an homage to slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and she penned the song that became known as the black national anthem, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," inspired by Lorraine Hansberry's play of the same name. In between, Simone recorded everything from instrumental piano albums to lightweight pop and interpretations of French ballads.
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The young Signoret radiated beauty and a ripe sensuality which glowed tangibly from the screen. She moved with the indolent languor of a woman supremely confident in her own powers of attraction; the slow, sleepy smile and the heavy-lidded eyes irresistibly evoked thoughts of warm bedrooms and summer meadows. Inevitably, she was cast time and again as a prostitute, a profession amply represented in the postwar French cinema.
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