Another loss in the film world. French actress Simone Simon died today in Paris at the age of 93. She is best known for her role as the enigmatic and troubled Irena Dubrovna in Val Lewton's 1942 production of Jacques Tourneur's Cat People. It's an intriguing film, cast in pools of light and shadow, thick with mystery, and handling the subtexts of female frigidity and sexual awakening with a deftness that films of that time just didn't approach (unless it was a low-budget horror movie). Simon's performance was a key part of the movie's success. Her Irena is soft, vulnerable, perhaps ingenuously earnest; but behind her pretty and exotic eyes, as she melts into the shadows, we can sense her rigidly held surface melting as well, failing to keep the beast in check.
Hollywood was just a small part of her career. Simon starred in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine in 1938, and in Max Olphuls' La Ronde and Le Plaisir in 1950 and 1952 respectively. She retired from the movie industry in 1956 and, for nearly 50 years, presumably never looked back.
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