Simone Signoret

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Simone Signoret,
Japanese movie poster by Goldhelm , 1951

Simone Signoret , actually Simone Henriette Charlotte Kaminker , (born March 25, 1921 in Wiesbaden , German Reich , † September 30, 1985 in Auteuil-Authouillet , Eure , France ) was a French actress and writer . Signoret was considered one of the leading character actresses of her generation.

Life

Simone Signoret was the daughter of the translator André Kaminker (1888–1961). When she was born in Wiesbaden , he was stationed there as an army officer in the French occupation troops after the First World War . Her father was of Polish-Jewish origin, her mother Georgette Signoret (1896–1984) was Catholic and came from Provence . Simone Signoret had two younger brothers, Alain and Jean-Pierre. In her youth she lived in Brittany. After completing her baccalaureate , she wanted to study law.

Her father fled the German troops to London in 1940 and joined the Free French armed forces there. In 1941 she gave herself the maiden name of her mother because she would have been considered a " half-Jewish " under the German occupation under Nazi criteria . She worked as a secretary for the newspaper Le Petit Parisien .

She got her mother and two brothers through the war on their own, doing casual work and later acting. In 1941 she got her first film role. In 1943 she married the director Yves Allégret , who had previously been the secretary of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky . With Allégret they had their daughter Catherine Allégret . In 1950 she divorced and in 1951 married the chansonnier and film actor Yves Montand .

Signoret starred in numerous major films and won the Acting Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 and the Oscar for best female leading role in The Way Up . In 1978 she received the César for best actress in Madame Rosa . Here she embodied a former prostitute who runs a kindergarten for the children of abandoned prostitutes in a tenement house. Signoret was also successful at the theater, especially alongside Yves Montand in The Witches of Salem (1957) and in Macbeth (1966) at the Royal Court Theater in London.

Community grave of Simone Signoret and Yves Montand on the Père Lachaise

She also became known for her fearless political commitment. As early as 1950, she and Montand signed the Stockholm appeal to ban all nuclear weapons and were subsequently banned from entering the USA . She publicly protested against the crackdown on the Hungarian people's uprising by the Soviet Union , France's Algerian war and the Spanish Franco regime, and was involved in workers' strikes. In 1980 she played theater for the political campaign Charter 77 in Munich . Her widely acclaimed novel Adieu Wolodja was published a year before her death .

Signoret died in 1985 of complications from cancer and was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris , where her husband was also buried six years later.

Filmography (selection)

Fonts

  • Simone Signoret: La nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle était. 1978; German: Undivided memories. Translated from the French by Gerlinde Quenzer and Günter Seib, Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-462-02593-7 .
  • Simone Signoret: Adieu Volodia. 1984; German: Adieu Wolodja. Translated from the French by Elisabeth Lutz. Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach, 1987, ISBN 3-404-10940-6 .

documentary

  • Memories of Simone (OT: Mémoires pour Simone ), documentary, France, 1986, restored version 2013, 62 min., Script and director: Chris Marker , production: Festival de Cannes, summary by ARD .
  • Film star with character - Simone Signoret (OT: Simone Signoret, figure libre ), documentary, France, 2019, 53 min., Director: Michèle Dominici, production: Arte France Ina Quark Productions, summary by ARD .

literature

  • Patricia A. DeMaio: Garden of dreams. The life of Simone Signoret. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2014, ISBN 978-1-60473-569-7 .

Web links

Commons : Simone Signoret  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Simone Kaminker, dite Simone Signoret. In: Editions Larousse . Accessed April 21, 2015 (French).
  2. ↑ a b Simone Signoret. In: France Inter . Accessed April 21, 2015 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Signoret, Simone
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kaminker, Simone Henriette Charlotte (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French film actress
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesbaden , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH September 30, 1985
Place of death Auteuil-Authouillet , Eure , France