Simone Simon

Simone Simon (born Simone Thérèse Fernande Simon on 23 April 1911 in Marseille, France) was a French film actress whose career spanned more than four decades, encompassing both European art‑house cinema and Hollywood genre classics. The daughter of Henri Louis Firmin Clair Simon, a French Jewish engineer and World‑II pilot, and Erma Maria Domenica Giorcelli, an Italian housewife, she spent her childhood moving between Madagascar, Budapest, Turin and Berlin before finally settling in Marseille, where she later attended school and dreamed of becoming a sculptor. In 1931 she moved to Paris, working briefly as a singer, model and fashion designer before being discovered in a restaurant by director Victor Tourjansky, who offered her a film contract and launched her screen debut in Le chanteur inconnu (1931). Within a few years she became one of France’s most celebrated actresses, earning praise for her performance in Marc Allégret’s Lac aux dames (1934) and establishing a reputation for both beauty and a fierce independence that sometimes clashed with studio expectations.

Her growing fame attracted the attention of Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, who brought her to the United States in 1935 with a major publicity push, yet language barriers and cultural differences made her American transition turbulent. After a series of miscast or aborted projects—including a brief stint on Under Two Flags and a replacement on A Message to Garcia—she finally appeared in Girls' Dormitory (1936), where critics lauded her delicate yet commanding presence. Although her early Hollywood films achieved only modest success, she found lasting acclaim in the early 1940s with Val Lewton’s horror productions, most famously starring in Cat People (1942) and its sequel The Curse of the Cat People (1944), films that cemented her legacy as a femme fatale of atmospheric suspense. After World War II she returned to France, appearing in Jean Renoir’s La Bête Humaine (1938) and Max Ophüls’ La Ronde (1950), before gradually stepping away from the screen, making her final film appearance in 1973. Simon never married, had no children, and spent her later years in Paris, where she died on 22 February 2005 at the age of 93, leaving behind a reputation for charm, an irresistible smile, and an enduring influence on both French and American cinema.