Individual, indelible and unduplicated--still stars in their own constellations : SIMONE SIGNORET--REALISM AT THE TOP

Actors and actresses being, like the rest of us, ones of a kind, you don’t expect them to inspire close imitation, except perhaps in small, superficial details. There may have been a Brando school for a while, until it became obvious that putting on a torn T-shirt and grunting did not make you the superb actor Brando is.

Yet over the years a very small, select group of actors and actresses have become influences. In their individual and indelible ways, they have expanded the possibilities of their art. They’ve shown how a performer’s unique mixture of skill and soul can convey truth in deeper, rounder, more persuasive ways than might have been thought possible before.

We lost one of that number this week when Simone Signoret died at the age of 64. As only a relatively few actresses have been, she was brilliant at every age--as a breathtakingly beautiful young woman, as a sensual and sensitive mature woman and as a ripe and unsparingly honest older woman, in films like “The Cat,” with Jean Gabin, and the great triumph of her last years, “Madame Rosa.”

Signoret, it always seemed to me, was the principal glory of a postwar generation of Continental and British actresses who constituted a new breed. She and Anna Magnani from Italy and, slightly later, Vanessa Redgrave in Britain, and others (never many), became the more exciting as actresses because they were perceived as real and usually very complicated women rather than as exotic creatures of manufactured cosmetic myth.

It was not that Hollywood had not had its free spirits--Bette Davis chief among them, then and now. But when the dream factory was at its dreamiest, there was always a hunch that the private woman was even more interesting than most of the roles she played.

But the postwar films from Europe were revelations, in their frankness, in their narrowing of the gulf between life as it was lived and life as it was customarily portrayed on the screen. And somehow, from early days, the difficult and tumultuous real life Signoret had led as a child and during the war was perceived by the camera--not as biography but as spirit. She as a woman was perfectly coordinated with her moment in the life of film.

It is forever true that those we anoint as stars reflect one way or another the envies or aspirations, the dream-wishes, of the audience. Signoret suggested both independence and vulnerability, the power to give and receive love unabashedly--and the power of that love to exalt, to wound and possibly to lead into evil. She was seen as a woman of the real world, and at a certain point in film history, that was in itself a revelation. In her honesty and in her vitality, she had enormous appeal to women, eager to be like her, and to men, who wished they knew someone who was.

Looking back, it seems clear that Signoret was on the forward edge of what came to be called the revolution of raised consciousness. She had no wish to be immobilized atop a pedestal and no intention to accept a silent, second-class status. But she took her own freedom of spirit and movement as simply the way things were, and she was not a doctrinaire feminist. (Once, as we were riding back to Cannes after a festival luncheon, she and Kenneth Tynan were arguing about women’s liberation. “Equal wages and legal abortion; the rest is baloney,” Signoret said, ending the discussion.)

The arrival of television provoked profound changes in American movies, and the nature of those changes was shaped in some considerable part by the impact of those postwar film imports, from “Open City” to “La Ronde” and beyond. Their message that there was another way to tell it and other, non-mythic ways for performers to present themselves fell on sympathetic eyes and ears in this country.

Signoret became an international star, of course, and “Room at the Top,” with its unvarnished look at ambition and ruthless betrayal, reflected a new kind of social realism, with Signoret as a tragic figure, drawn from observable life.

Her self-effacing portrayal in Stanley Kramer’s “Ship of Fools,” of an overweight, perspiring, dying, defeated woman, was an act of bravery as well as consummate art, and I thought she should have had the Oscar as well as the nomination.

In the fortunate way of film actors, Signoret leaves a fine legacy of work to be re-enjoyed and rediscovered endlessly. What may be less obvious is that she has also left new generations of performers and film makers a forever enlarged and enriched set of possibilities for their art.