LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Simone Signoret: Le Chat
built 657 days ago
Starring international sex symbol Simone Signoret, CASQUE D'OR is often considered director Jacques Becker's masterpiece. Becker was an assistant to the legendary Jean Renoir, and Renoir's influence on Becker is readily apparent in this poetic, impressionist film. Signoret plays Marie, the girlfriend of a minor gangster, who falls in love with a working man. Their love affair leads to a power struggle within the gang and speeds everyone inexorably towards tragedy. CASQUE D'OR features a diligent and careful production design that recreates Paris of the late 19th century, and was based on actual criminal cases from that era. Though dismissed on its initial release in 1952, aside from a BAFTA acting award for Signoret, the critical reputation of CASQUE D'OR grew in subsequent years and is now generally considered one of France's great artistic films.
Source:
Fed up with racism in the United States, Simone led an itinerant life beginning in 1974, living in Liberia, Barbados, Switzerland, France, Trinidad, Belgium and England. She collaborated with Who guitarist Pete Townshend in 1989 on his musical "The Iron Man," and she underwent a brief career revival in 1993 when her five of her songs were used on the soundtrack to the film "Point of No Return." Simone moved to France in 1993 and mounted a world tour in 2001, though her health was beginning to fail at the time.
Source:
Signoret was niet alleen een bewonderd actrice, ze bleek ook te kunnen schrijven. Zij publiceerde haar autobiografie in 1976: La nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle était, die een bestseller werd. In 1979 verscheen haar geprezen vervolgmemoires: Le lendemain, elle était souriante.... Postuum, in 1986, verscheen haar in 1984 voltooide roman Adieu Volodia, over Russische en Poolse joden die zich aan het begin van de 20e eeuw in Frankrijk vestigden, over haar eigen wortels dus. Ook dit boek was een groot verkoopsucces en de literaire kritiek was ook weer positief.
Source:
Defiantly unconventional, Signoret made no attempt to conceal the growing heaviness of her face and figure, even emphasizing it with drably unglamorous roles. Often she played women oppressed by the past: a survivor of the concentration camps in Lumet's downbeat thriller The Deadly Affair based on a John Le Carré novel; an impressive Arkadina in the same director's The Sea Gull, co-starring Vanessa Redgrave, another actress known and ostracized for her political views; movingly dignified as the fated Resistance fighter in L'Armée des ombres; hiding frustrated love beneath outward bitterness in Le Chat; and vulnerability to her illicit love for doomed Oskar Werner in Ship of Fools. Such roles were never depressing, given the vitality of her presence.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Le Chat