Tue 7 - Tue 14 Dec

100 Years: Simone Signoret, the Political Star

Festivals & Series

From Les Diaboliques to her Oscar-winning turn in Room at the Top (the first best actress Academy Award won by a non-American film) and rarely shown films from the last decade of her career, Ciné Lumière will honour the luminous screen career of Simone Signoret, 100 years after her birth.

Signoret straddled the classic era of French cinema, 1960s Hollywood and British kitchen-sink drama in a series of brilliant performances. Engaged in politics from an early age, she embodied the daring end of post-war cinema, bringing spark and wit to even the smallest of roles, before proceeding to play some of the strongest and most complex female characters of the time.

She was to become one of the most prominent and daring older women of European cinema, refreshing in her honesty about ageing and desire. As she famously wrote: “I got old the way women who aren’t actresses grow old.”

Through it all, Signoret became something like the epitome of French screen acting and one of its most indelible figures.

Replay the introduction, ‘Simone Signoret, French icon and international star‘, by Dr Sarah Leahy, senior lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Newcastle and author of doctoral thesis on Simone Signoret and Brigitte Bardot: Femininities in 1950s French Cinema: