Simone Signoret was an Earth Mother of an actress, a specialist in playing jaded women of the world who retain a certain vulnerability and can be at once maternal and seductive. The outstanding example of this type of Signoret character was Alice Aisgil, the Frenchwoman whose love affair with a young Englishman leads to tragic results in Room at the Top (1959). The performance brought Signoret numerous Best Actress honors including the American and British Academy Awards and the Cannes Film Festival Award. She was the first woman to win a Best Actress Oscar for a non-American film.

Born Henriette Charlotte Simone Kaminker in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1921, she grew up in Paris. To veil the Jewish heritage of her French-born father, she took her mother's maiden name of Signoret when she began working in films in the early 1940s in Nazi-occupied France. After making her film debut in an uncredited bit in Boléro (1942), she found regular work in movies, often cast because of her earthy sensuality as a prostitute. Her most memorable role of that type came in Max Ophuls' La Ronde (1950), as a beautiful woman of the night whose encounter with a soldier begins a roundelay of romantic entanglements.

Among Signoret's French films, the one most often seen in the U.S. is Diabolique (1955), Henri-Georges Clouzot's horrific thriller in which she plays a mistress who plots with her lover's wife (Véra Clouzot) to murder the man in their lives. She acted in many other highly regarded French films of the 1950s including Casque d'or (1952), Thérèse Raquin (1953) and Les Sorcières de Salem (1957), adapted from Arthur Miller's play The Crucible.

Signoret acted opposite Laurence Olivier in the U.K. production Term of Trial (1962); he plays a schoolteacher forced to defend himself from a love-struck teen-ager (Sarah Miles) and Signoret is his scornful wife. Signoret made a rare appearance in an American film in Stanley Kramer's Ship of Fools (1965) as a drug-addicted countess ministered to by compassionate, troubled ship doctor Oskar Werner; both were Oscar-nominated. In the spy story The Deadly Affair (1966), based on a John le Carré novel and filmed in England, Signoret plays a concentration camp survivor.

Heralded as one of France's great film stars, Signoret continued to win acclaim as she ripened into her more mature years. She played the world-weary retired prostitute Madame Rosa in the Oscar-winning La vie devant soi (1977), and a spinster who unwittingly enters a romantic correspondence with her paralyzed brother in I Sent a Letter to My Love (1980). Her final feature film was Guy de Maupassant (1982), in which she plays the title character's mother.

Signoret was married from 1944 to 1949 to filmmaker Yves Allégret, with whom she had a daughter, actress Catherine Allégret; and from 1950 until her death to celebrated actor/entertainer Yves Montand. She published a memoir, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be, in 1978, and also was the author of a novel, Adieu Volodya, published in 1985, the year of her death.

by Roger Fristoe