Adieu, Ma Belle

By Thomas A. Sancton

With her full, sensuous mouth, long-lashed blue eyes and cascading blond hair, she was one of the most seductive starlets of the postwar years. But as the looks faded and a web of wrinkles covered a once lovely face, she gave some of her most memorable performances in the roles of older women. She also scored unexpected triumphs with her pen, publishing three best-selling books since 1976. When she died last week at 64, of cancer, in the Normandy village of Autheuil-Authouillet, Simone Signoret had attained far more than movie stardom. "For more than 40 years," declared President Francois Mitterrand, "she spoke to the hearts of the French people."

Born Simone Kaminker in Wiesbaden, Germany, where her father was an officer in the post-World War I French occupation force, she grew up in the affluent Paris suburb of Neuilly. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, her father, a Jew, fled to Britain to join Charles de Gaulle's Free French army. Simone remained in France with her family, adopting her mother's maiden name --Signoret--to escape detection by the Nazis, and worked as a secretary for the Paris daily Les Nouveaux Temps.

She soon left the paper because of its pro-German sympathies and immersed herself in the intellectual and artistic life that flourished around the Cafe de Flore on Paris' Left Bank. Those contacts led to her first walk-on movie parts and, in 1946, to a starring role in Jacques Feyder's Macadam.

Thus began an acting career that spanned more than 40 films and four decades. Among her best-known early pictures were Casque d'Or (1952), which won her the British Film Academy award for her portrayal of a free spirit, and Room at the Top (1959), for which she was awarded the Oscar for best actress, in the sensitively played role of a woman who was jilted by an ambitious younger lover. By then, at the age of 37, Signoret had reached a turning point in her professional life. "That is a difficult age for an actress," she recalled in an interview in 1978. "It means that when she is still pretty good-looking, she must decide that interesting parts are going to be on the other side of the line and that it is useless to hang on to those branches of youth."

Through the 1960s and '70s, as chain-smoking and drinking took their toll on her health, Signoret was increasingly cast as a gutsy, worldly older woman. Probably her best performance of the period was in Moshe Mizrahi's 1977 film, La Vie Devant Soi (Madame Rosa in English), in which she played a Jewish ex- prostitute and survivor of a concentration camp. The theme of Jewish life in France was also the subject of her best-selling novel, Adieu, Volodia, which appeared this year. She had previously published two memoirs, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be (1976) and Le Lendemain, elle etait souriante (1979).

Signoret's autobiographical works filled in the details of a personal life whose outlines were already well known. Divorced from Director Yves Allegret in l949, she married Actor-Singer Yves Montand two years later. Despite Montand's well-publicized fling with Marilyn Monroe in 1960, the couple were together for 36 years. "I love her more than ever today," Montand told an interviewer in 1972, "because she is a woman of extraordinary vitality and enthusiasm."

One enthusiasm that the couple shared throughout their marriage was left-wing politics. Although they never joined the Communist Party, Signoret and Montand were considered two of France's best-known fellow travelers until the Soviets' 1956 invasion of Hungary dashed their faith in the Soviet Union as the wave of the future. They never wavered in their support for human-rights causes, however. Signoret was most recently active on behalf of the "SOS- Racisme" antiracist movement in France. But as she put it last spring, "I have crossed the border into antiCommunism." Summing up her career, Author Max Gallo wrote last week, "She will remain the voice of a century that is ending, a century that she helped us live through with a throbbing heart, both sincere and deceived . . . always fighting, never abdicating."