Subtle Poison

"Here in Hollywood," says Simone Signoret, "there is a tendency to think this place is the world. Sometimes I think people should get out of here." But not this week. This week, thanks to her performance in a brilliant English movie, Room at the Top (TIME, April 20, 1959), the visitor from France owns the town. Most of the smart money is backing her for an Oscar when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives its award for the year's best actress. Whether she wins or not, hers is certainly the only new face --and the most exciting--among the nominees.-Says Simone: "It's pleasant to have sympathetic roles and be popular. I've begun to drink the subtle poison."

She sips the potion with imperturbable grace as she holds court in a lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, flustering her own pressagents, for whom she has little need, and chattering over a beige-colored phone in her serviceable English and sparkling French. Her robust charm, the shaggy, Chablis-tinted hair over soft, wide-set eyes, and the generous mouth that twists with Gallic wit as the words come tumbling out, all add up to a sultry but utterly unphony femininity that makes her, at 39, far sexier than most of Hollywood's chromium-plated babes. She describes her own quality perfectly as she discusses Room at the Top, in which she brought calm skill and warm, intimate understanding to the role of an unhappily married woman engaged in a last and lonely affair. "It sustained both sexes," says she. "It was very reassuring to women of 40 and over. And the men liked it because a lot of them have had an affair with an older woman--or wanted to."

Somewhat Illegal. Occasional criticism of her politics (her husband, Singer Yves Montand, was an unabashed fellow traveler, and she too has displayed a few leftish twinges) troubles her not at all. "My mother," says she, "was the kind to tan hides when people haven't given up a seat in the metro or taken back a racist remark. I'm a little bit like that."

Simone grew up in Paris, was 19 when she pitched in to help support her family when her father took off for England to work for De Gaulle (he later became chief of U.N. interpreters). After the liberation, she hung out in Saint-Germaindes-Pres, at the Cafe de Flore and La Rose Rouge. She took up with a group of young actors, and soon she was acting herself. In 1947 Simone married Yves Allegret, the director who helped her through her first films.

A few summers later, in a resort near Cannes, Simone met Montand. Defying gossip, the pair promptly set out for Paris. Long after her divorce from Allegret, Simone admitted, "I still have the feeling that I'm living somewhat illegally with the gentleman for whom I left my husband."

Somewhat Jealous. She made more movies, played with Montand in stage and screen versions of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, was seen by U.S. audiences in the memorable chiller, Diaboligue. Yet Simone insists that she is too lazy to be a great star, and too bent on following her husband wherever his career takes him. "Not that I'm sacrificing anything," she adds hastily. "It's just that between lousy scripts and being with him, I'd rather be with him. Of course I'm jealous too," she says. "There's good reason to be. A singer attracts more women than anybody else. His voice acts on their nervous systems."

As for her Oscar nomination, she accepted it as serenely as she received (wearing a two-year-old black dress) the Cannes Film Festival award for the year's best actress. "I hadn't made use of the press," she says. "I hadn't taken a lover. I hadn't cut my hair in front of a photographer. I had worked well; I was proud and not at all modest about having seen quality win out, of having succeeded at my profession and only at my profession."

*The others: Doris (Pillow Talk) Day, Audrey (The Nun's Story) Hepburn, Katharine (Suddenly, Last Summer) Hepburn, Elizabeth (Suddenly, Last Summer) Taylor.

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