Simone Simon, Actress in ‘Cat People’ Horror Film, Dies at 93
NY Times
Simone Simon, the French actress of near-feline beauty best known to American audiences for her haunting role in the 1942 RKO horror film “Cat People,” died on Tuesday in Paris. She was 93.
Her death was announced by her friends and family to Agence France-Presse.
In “Cat People” Ms. Simon played a Serbian-born wife who fears that when her passions are aroused she will turn into a panther that kills. Her casting in this film and its mostly unrelated sequel, “The Curse of the Cat People” (RKO, 1944), was probably inspired by her role as the devil’s emissary in “All That Money Can Buy” (RKO, 1941), an adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benet’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” in which Ms. Simon’s character steals a good man from his wife.
Ms. Simon made one other film for RKO, “Mademoiselle Fifi” (1944), an adaptation of two Guy de Maupassant stories about a French laundress who defies occupying German forces during the Franco-Prussian war. Although it was not a hit in the United States, it was the first American film to be shown in France after the Normandy invasion.
Ms. Simon was born on April 23, 1911, in Bèthune, France, to Henri Louis Firmin and Erma Maria Domenica Giorcelli. She grew up in Marseilles. After working briefly in Paris as a fashion designer and model, she made her stage debut in 1931 in the operetta “Balthazar.”
Mademoiselle Fifi
Simone Simon memorabilia at eBay.com
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