Michel Simon, who steals the show in Jean Vigo’s 1934 masterpiece L’Atalante, was a soft-faced, gravelly voiced clown capable of tremendous pathos – and total chaos
Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, his poetic and surreal 1934 romance about a young couple living on a canal barge, is one of the most beautiful, sensual films of all time. Dita Parlo and Jean Dasté play the newlyweds getting awkwardly accustomed to married life in close quarters, and their love story shapes the film. But it’s their bargemate, the uncouth Père Jules, played by Michel Simon, who steals the show: a well-travelled sailor speckled with tattoos, standing guard over a cabinet of risque and macabre curiosities, whose cabin teems with cats every bit as unruly as he is.
The Swiss actor Michel Simon was one of the most distinctive presences in 20th-century French cinema: a soft-faced, gravelly voiced clown capable of tremendous pathos, and true chaos. Charlie Chaplin called him “the greatest actor in the world”. He worked with the best European directors on some timeless films. As well as acting for Vigo, he played the timid man transformed by his affair with a sex worker in La Chienne (1931) and the incorrigible tramp in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) for Jean Renoir. He worked with Marcel Carné in films such as Le Quai des Brumes (1938), with Carl Theodor Dreyer in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), with René Clair, Marcel L’Herbier, Julien Duvivier, GW Pabst … even John Frankenheimer in The Train (1964). “When Michel Simon plays a part,” said Truffaut, “we penetrate the core of the human heart.” He spent five decades working in the cinema, starting out in the silents, and received his highest accolade, the Berlinale’s Best Actor award in 1967, for his role as an antisemitic peasant befriending a young Jewish boy during the war in The Two of Us (Claude Berri). Reviewing that movie, Renata Adler called Simon “an enormous old genius … the general impression is that of an immense, thoughtful, warm-hearted and aquatic geological formation”.
