Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be [Mass Market Paperback]

Simone Signoret (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (May 1, 1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140051813
• ISBN-13: 978-0140051810
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #951,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Simone's Nostalgia, March 15, 2000

By 

Marietje Halbertsma - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nostalgia Isn't What it Used to be (Hardcover)

It rarely happens that a great movie actress also manages to be a great writer. Signoret tells her life story in a lively, literary prose. She makes no excuses for the mistakes she made. She is a master in evoking the atmosphere of a meeting, a conversation or a movie set. Her description of the people she meets on her travels are rivetting.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Life of La Signoret, October 11, 2006

By 

Stephanie DePue (Carolina Beach, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be (Mass Market Paperback)

In an article entitled "In Praise of Older Women," "Time" magazine once remarked that Simone Signoret was "everywoman's Bogart, in a trenchcoat, dangling a cigarette, in "Room At The Top." Should you find yourself saying some modern equivalent of "Right on, sister,"at this, you might want to find this autobiography.

Signoret (born, Wiesbaden, Germany, March 25,1921; died, High Jura, France, September 30,1985 ) might seem typically French middle-class at first glance. In fact,she was raised in Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, in an intellectual atmosphere. She studied English in school, took a teachers degree, and tutored in English and Latin. She spoke English, German, and French. But her father, an officer in the French army and a linguist who later worked at the United Nations, was descended from Polish Jews. He barely made it out of France ahead of the German Occupation of World War II: he fled to England, where he served with French General Charles de Gaulle. This left Signoret, as a young woman, to shoulder the burden of supporting her mother and two younger brothers. She first went to work at a collaborationist newspaper, "Le Nouveau Temps," so collaborationist that her boss Jean Luchaire, faced a firing squad at war's end.

However, she herself discovered the Cafe Flore, home of France's intelligentsia these many years, and decided she wanted to act. Through the Occupation of France, she continued, by working constantly in the film industry, always as an extra or perhaps with just one line,to support mother and brothers. She lacked proper papers, owing to her father; used her mother's maiden name, Signoret, rather than her father's name, Kaminker; and had to keep a low low profile.

But all wars eventually end, even World War II, and her career began to build. Along the way to "Casque d'or, " her first major French picture, she loved, lived with, had a girl Catherine by, and eventually married French film director Yves Allegret. Then in a dramatic, wrenching emotional upheaval, she met French cabaret star Yves Montand. They eventually married, and she even managed to talk him into making a few movies, such as "Wages of Fear," "Z", and "State of Siege."

The couple were outspoken left-wingers, and though Hollywood began to flirt in the 1950's, they couldn't get visas to enter this country. Mind you, they had minds of their own. Previous commitments required them to tour the Soviet Union shortly after its brutal repression of the Polish Uprising of 1956. One evening the Politburo came to late supper, and the pair told then-leader Nikita Khrushchev just what they thought of his methods.

At any rate, in 1959, at age 38, Signoret became an international star with the English-made "Room at the Top." She and her husband were finally able to get visas into the States: she was able to be in Los Angeles in 1960 to collect her Best Leading Actress Oscar for "Room." She was the first woman to win the Best Actress award in a non-American made film. The couple decided to stay on while Montand made "Let's Make Love" with Marilyn Monroe.

Signoret discusses the period when she and Montand lived above Marilyn Monroe and her then-husband Arthur Miller, in Bungalows 20 and 21 of the Beverly Hills Hotel, as "Let's Make Love" was made. There was nearly worldwide gossip about a Monroe-Montand affair, and later Monroe did tell her dresser Lena Pepitone, that after Signoret and Miller left town for other commitments, they did. Signoret, however, never believed it. She wrote of Monroe, "She's gone, without ever knowing that I never stopped wearing the champagne colored silk scarf she'd lent me one day....It's a bit frayed now, but if I fold it carefully, the fray doesn't show."

The author is biting in her treatment of Lillian Hellman, who confided in her book "Pentimento" that she hated Signoret's "Regina" in the French stage production of Hellman's play "The Little Foxes." She's moving in her discussion of a handsome young Greek, holding a carnation in a famous picture. He was a left-winger, and was clandestinely murdered, in the beams of a Dodge truck, by the neo-fascist right in 1953. He and his carnation were reborn in Montand's "Z."

And the woman's wonderful on her decision to age, " like everybody else, and quietly accept the idea that 45 puts you on the road to 46 rather than to 44.... It's very easy to go on functioning at the same rhythm as your contemporaries, to mature with them, and to age with them. And it's miraculous when life brings you parts that seem to grow better each year, stronger, laden with the memories and personal experiences that have put those lines on your face. They are the scars of the laughter, the tears, the questions, the astonishments and the certainties that are also those of your contemporaries. I chose not to go /to the plastic surgeons/. I didn't go because I've never been a star." Now there, Mme Montand, you fibbed a bit.

The actress was also well-known for her films "Les Diaboliques," and "Ship of Fools," in which she co-starred with Vivien Leigh. She is buried in Paris's famed Le Pere Lachaise Cemetery. A French postage stamp was issued in her honor on October 3, 1998. The late great American jazz singer Nina Simone always told interviewers she'd taken her name from Signoret's. Signoret, you see, had a lot going for her, in addition to that dangling cigarette.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Landmark!, February 21, 2011

By 

waitsfortherain - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be (Mass Market Paperback)

Simone Signoret was not only one of the most breathtakingly talented actors of the 20th century as one of the most fascinating women of all time. That towards the end of her life she should emerge as an enormously gifted writer sounds almost too good to be true. And yet, that's exactly what happened. As soon as it came out, "Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be" made it clear that it was not just one more actor's autobiography destined to delight the author's millions of fans. It soon became a landmark in the sense that very few actors have written a book to equal it. It doesn't read like an autobiography. More likely, it sounds like a poet, a beautifully gifted one, talking to you about the things she has seen and the people she has met. You're both at the table of a café where you met by chance, and the images of a lifetime unfold like a ballad. It's a remarkable achievement to turn your own past into such a fascinating tale. Had time permitted it, she would surely have followed this and her immensely successful first novel "Adieu, Volodia" with more works of the same delicacy. Alas, she went away at sixty-four, leaving a great void in the hearts of those who loved her. Like me. On the day I learned she had died, I got into a bookshop and bought a copy of "Adieu, Volodia." Then I wrote on the front page: "I wish I had been able to kiss this great woman on the face and told her how much I loved her." The closest I ever got to it was sharing my love with as many people as possible, telling them that they should see her films (a really hard task being picking up one as containing her best performance), and that they should definitely read "Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be." Anyone who does can be counted for sure to savor that marvelous feeling that overtakes you after reading certain books, of thinking: "I'm not what I used to be. Not anymore. Now I'm better."