Michel Simon
Michel Simon (born April 9, 1895 in Geneva , Switzerland ; † May 30, 1975 in Bry-sur-Marne ; actually François Simon ) was a Swiss actor and a monstre sacré of French film.
Life
Michel Simon was born in Geneva in the same year as the cinema (his comment: "An accident seldom comes alone") as the son of a Protestant butcher. Simon moved to Paris early on , where he made ends meet with odd jobs (including as a boxing teacher and assistant to a photographer) and performed in vaudeville theaters as a clown and acrobat . After a short time in the Swiss Army, most of which he spent in detention (where he contracted tuberculosis ), a visit to the theater in Geneva in 1915 with Georges Pitoëff's troupe encouraged him to become an actor. In 1916 he married the musician Yvonne Nadège Ryter. Simon's son François , who later became an actor himself , comes from the marriage, which was divorced in 1919 .
In 1918, Simon finally joined Georges Pitoëff. He made his debut in Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare . With Pitoëff's troupe he went to Paris, where they appeared in the Comédie des Champs-Élysées. Soon he was playing in tabloids , musicals and vaudeville, as well as in plays by Tristan Bernard , Yves Mirand and Marcel Achard . In 1929 he jumped in for Pitoëff and had great success at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, initially with Achards Jean de la lune . This was followed by others in plays by Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw , Oscar Wilde and Luigi Pirandello .
Michel Simon made his film debut in 1924 in La Galerie des Monstres and in 1925 in Feu Mathias Pascal by Marcel L'Herbier after Pirandello. In 1928 he played a judge in Carl Dreyer's The Passion of the Maid of Orléans ( La passion de Jeanne d'Arc ). He had popular success with the film adaptation of Jean de la lune - by Jean Choux (1931) and with his portrait of the dreamy sailor "Jules" in L'Atalante (1934) by Jean Vigo , who lives happily with his animals (also surrounded himself privately Simon with animals). He had already played a convincing clochard in 1932 in Boudu sauvé des eaux . In 1931 he started working with his friend Jean Renoir with Die Hündin ( La chienne ) . He also starred in Marcel Carné's A Strange Case ( Drôle de drame , 1937) and in Mystery of Saint-Agil ( Les disparus de Saint-Agil , 1938) by Christian-Jaque . In the 1950s he was disabled by partial facial paralysis caused by an accident with a makeup product that attacked his nervous system. Nevertheless, he continued to have film successes such as 1951 The Monster by Sacha Guitry . He became known to the German and Swiss audiences through his (secondary) role of the wrongly accused peddler Jacquier in the Dürrenmatt film It happened in bright day , 1958, by Ladislao Vajda with Heinz Rühmann and Gert Fröbe .
Since 1965 Simon lived with the 41 years younger artist Margarethe Krieger . At the age of 80 he died of heart failure in a hospital near Paris . He was buried next to his parents in Grand-Lancy near Geneva.
Filmography
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Awards
- 1964: Hans Reinhart-Ring
- 1967: Silver Bear for The Old Man and the Child by Claude Berri at the Berlinale
literature
- Serge M. Zuber: Michel Simon . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz - Dictionnaire du théâtre en Suisse. Volume 3, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , p. 1689 f. (French)
Web links
- Literature by and about Michel Simon in the catalog of the German National Library
- Michel Simon in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Bernard Gasser: Michel Simon. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- Short biography
- Short biography
Individual evidence
- ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Michel Simon
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Simon, Michel |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swiss actor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 9, 1895 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Geneva |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 30, 1975 |
| Place of death | Bry-sur-Marne |