Simone Signoret

Was featured on the poster of the 2013 César awards.

Portrayed on a postage stamp issued on 3 October 1998 by the French Post Office.

The Signoret film that is shown most often on TV and that got a theatrical re-release in 1995, four decades after it was made is the French thriller Diabolique (1955). The chilly character Signoret plays is proof of her acting ability.

[Actor Philippe Noiret on working with Simone Signoret in a 1983 interview] It was quite an experience because she is a fabulous actress, because she knows absolutely everything about movies, about what an actor can do on the screen. It's a real challenge to have someone like that in front of you. But she is quite hard to work with because she wants to be at the head of everything, and you have to remain very alert because otherwise she can eat you. Alas, it makes things difficult. You have to stay a bit out of her reach because otherwise she might just manage to devour you.

The face of Simone Signoret on the Paris Metro movie posters in March 1982 looked even older than her 61 years.

She was still a box office draw, but the film, L'étoile du Nord (1982), would be her last theatrical release. She played the landlady. Signoret had a long film apprenticeship during World War II, mostly as an extra and occasionally getting to speak a single line. She was working without an official permit during the Nazi occupation of France, because her father, who had fled to England, was Jewish. Working almost all the time, she made enough as an extra to support her mother and three younger brothers.

Published her autobiography "La nostalgie n'est plus qu'elle était" ("Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be") in 1976.

Is one of 3 actresses to have won the Best Actress Oscar for playing a character called Alice. The others are Ellen Burstyn for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) and Julianne Moore for Still Alice (2014).

Simone Signoret won an Emmy in 1966 under the category of Single Performance by an actress for the TV movie A Small Rebellion.

Was originally cast as Madame Hortense in Zorba the Greek (1964) but she quit the production before filming began. Lila Kedrova, who went on to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, was cast instead.

Original choice to co-star with Elvis Presley in Wild in the Country (1961) but turned down the offer and the role went to Hope Lange.

They got visas in 1960 so Montand, as a singer, could perform in New York and San Francisco.

They were in Los Angeles in March 1960 when Signoret received the Oscar for best actress and stayed on so Montand could play opposite Marilyn Monroe in The Billionaire (1960).

Her breakthrough to international stardom came at the age of 38 with the British film Room at the Top (1959). Her Alice Aisgill, an unhappily married woman who hopes she has found true love, radiated real warmth in all of her scenes, not just those in bed.

Hollywood beckoned throughout the 1950s, but both Signoret and her second husband, Yves Montand, were refused visas to enter the United States; their progressive political activities did not sit well with the ultra-conservative McCarthy-era mentality that gripped the US at the time.

She was the same woman as Dedee, a prostitute who finds true love in Dédée d'Anvers (1948), a film directed by Signoret's first husband, Yves Allégret, a decade earlier.

Gave birth to her 2nd child at age 25, a daughter Catherine Allégret on April 16, 1946. Child's father was her then-married lover [and later 1st husband], Yves Allégret.

Gave birth to her 1st child at age 24, a son in 1945, with her then-married lover Yves Allégret, who would go on to be her 1st husband. However her son died at 9 days old.

Signoret, her mother's maiden name, was chosen for films in the early 1940s to raise fewer questions with the Nazi authorities than her real surname Kaminker.

Is one of 5 French actors to have won an Academy Award. The others in chronological order are: Claudette Colbert for It Happened One Night (1934), Juliette Binoche for The English Patient (1996), Marion Cotillard for La Vie En Rose (2007) and Jean Dujardin for The Artist (2011).

Author of 'Adieu Volodia', a novel about a group of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Russia and their children, working in the theatre/film industry in Paris during the years 1926-1945.

Born to André Kaminker (1888-1961), a Polish linguist, and his French wife Georgette Signoret, she had two younger brothers, Alain and Jean-Pierre.