Background
Montand, Yves was born on October 13, 1921 in Monsummano Alto, Italy.
Montand, Yves was born on October 13, 1921 in Monsummano Alto, Italy.
He went to France while very young and lived in Marseilles. From music hall, he went into movies and had a striking postwar debut: Etoile sans Lumière (45, Marcel Blistène); Les Portes de la Nuit (46, Marcel Carné); Souvenirs Perdus (49, Christian-Jaque); the international success of The Wages of Fear (53, H.G. Clouzot); Napoleon (55, Sacha Guitry); Les Héros sont Fatigués (55, Yves Ciampi); Marguerite de la Nuit (55, Claude Autant-Lara); Uomini e Lupi (56, Giuseppe de Santis); in an episode from Die Vind Rose (56, Yannik Bellon); Les Sorcières de Salem (57, Raymond Rouleau), the latter with his wife, Simone Signoret: and La Grande Strada Azzurra (57, Gillo Pontecorvo). After La Loi (58, Jules Dassin), he went to Hollywood, but failed as an “international” star; as the essentially unmalleable material in Let's Make Love (60, George Cukor), famously involved with Monroe; as a bowdlerized Popeye in Sanctuary (61, Tony Richardson); as the philanderer in Goodbye Again (61, Anatole Litvak); and in My Geisha (62, Jack Cardiff).
After that, he was based in Europe with occasional forays to America: The Sleeping Car Murders (65, Costa-Gavras); very good in La Guerre est Finie (66, Alain Resnais); Grand Piix (66, John Frankenheimer); Mr Freedom (68, William Klein); Un Soir. . . un Train (69, André Delvaux); Le Diable par la Queue (69, Philippe de Broca); On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (70, Vincente Minnelli); Le Cercle Bouge (70, Jean-Pierre Melville); La Folie des Grandeurs (71, Gerard Oury); Tout Va Bien (72, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin); Etat de Siège (73, Costa- Gavras); Le Sauvage (75, Jean-Paul Rappeneau); Vincent. François, Paid et les Autres (75, Claude Sautet); Flashback (77, Alain Corneau); La Menace (77, Corneau); and The Roads to the South (78, Joseph Losey).
In his final decade, Montand did maybe his best and most challenging work: Clair de Femme (79, Costa-Gcivras); I Comme Icare (80, Henri Verneuil); as a veteran crook in Le Choix des Armes (81, Corneau), playing with Deneuve and Depardieu; Tout Feu, Tout Flamme (82, Jean-Paul Rappenau); Garçon! (83, Sautet); superb in Jean de Florette (86, Claude Berri) and Manon des Sources (86, Berri); as an artful projection of himself in Trois Places pour le 26 (88, Jacques Demy); and IPS (92, Jean-Jacques Beneix).
So the perfect Frenchman was Italian. How authentic, then, is that spirit of black-coffee worldliness that Montand seemed to generate so effortlessly? In a way, one feels guilty of mistrusting him. In two films for Costa-Gavras—Z (68) and L’Aveu (70)—he acted out the left-wing principles that he was known for in his public life. And yet,he slid into the odiously fake world of Claude Lelouch in Vivre pour Vivre (67). His face seemed made for the glib revelation of Lelouch s hurried emotional journalism, and the unprincipled mixture of cheap romantic melodrama and supposed commitment to the worlds travails seemed to fit Montand’s professional shrug to the inch. Although an actor who relied on mature appeal, he seemed always a little shifty. His face in repose was sulky and calculating, and the smile that appeared when he knew he was being observed could have been pulled open by strings.
Married Simone Signoret Montand, 1951 (deceased September 1985). 1 child Valentin Giovanni Jacques Livi.