Monkey Soulmates and Extraordinary Talent: The Man Who Charlie Chaplin Called ‘The World’s Greatest Actor’ | film

CIan 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 ever made. Dita Barlow and Jean D’Asti play newlyweds who are awkwardly adjusting to married life in close quarters, and their love story shapes the film. But it’s their bargemate, the gruff Per Jules, played by Michel Simon, who steals the show: a well-travelled, tattooed sailor who stands guard over a cabinet full of dangerous and macabre curiosities, his cabin filled with cats every bit as unruly as he is.

Swiss actor Michel Simon was one of the most distinctive presences in 20th-century French cinema: a clown with a soft face and a raspy voice capable of enormous pathos and genuine chaos. Charlie Chaplin called him “the greatest actor in the world.” He worked with the best European directors on some memorable films. In addition to acting for Vigo, he played the shy man transformed by his affair with a prostitute in La Chienne (1931) and the dissolute tramp in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) by Jean Renoir. He worked with Marcel Carnet 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 Lherbier, Julien Duvivier, J. W. Pabst… and even John Frankenheimer in The Train (1964). “When Michel Simon plays a role, we penetrate to the heart of the human heart,” Truffaut said. He spent five decades working in cinema, starting in silent films, and won his highest honor, the Berlinale Prize for Best Actor in 1967, for his role as an anti-Semitic peasant who befriends a young Jewish boy during the war in We Both (Claude Berry). Reviewing this film, Renata Adler described Simon as “a colossal old genius…the overall impression is of an enormous, thoughtful, warm-hearted hydrogeological formation”.

This genius carved in stone was also known as an eccentric of the most beloved systems. Simon was an animal lover and anti-vivisectionist. Bear Jules’ pets in L’Atlante were rescued from alley cats, and Simone adopted the kitten who curls up in a phonograph horn. But this was just one of his many animal companions. He lived in a house surrounded by woods, with his menagerie of pets: cats, dogs, birds but mostly monkeys, for which Simon built a network of wired tunnels, allowing them free access to the entire house, which was filled with his esoteric collections including a large collection of pornography. The monkeys were Simon’s “best friends”, and he spoke of his deep sadness at the death of his beloved chimpanzee Zaza, who had been his companion for 20 years. He claimed that she killed herself when he had to leave for a long time. Simon firmly believed that his apes were morally superior to humans, and that if the roles were reversed “there would be one ape who could dismember a human being.”

Powerful words from the son of a sausage maker. Simon was born in 1895 in Geneva. His family moved to Montmartre, Paris, and before being drafted into the Swiss Army in 1914, Simon worked as a boxing trainer, and in a cabaret show, as a comedian, magician and acrobat, among other gigs. He was at home in the city’s dingy criminal Dimond. After graduating from the army, he began his acting career on the Paris stage, where he achieved great success in 1929. Simone had a minor role as Chloe Chloe, the heroine’s brother, in Marcel Achard’s play Jean de la Lune, but he stole the show every night – playing the role again in the film two years later. Simon had already begun his film career in 1924, but it was talkies that made him famous, because his husky voice matched his strong face and solid build – meaning he was as verbally expressive as he was in physical comedy.

On screen, he had an instant charisma, which lent itself well to playing eccentric characters like Budo the Tramp. It was this role that Renoir wrote for Simone, to highlight what the director described as his complex and non-committal nature. The film is a social satire, in which a wealthy bookseller rescues a vagabond who has thrown himself into the Seine River, and takes him to his family’s elegant home. The bookseller adopts the vagabond, but Budo violently resists all his attempts to transform him into a clean-shaven, polite bourgeois, to put it mildly. Critics and audiences were outraged, and it was a long time before the film was lauded as a classic.

Simone, who had a rebellious streak of his own and knew what was not favourable, took the role in L’Atalante partly in solidarity with Vigo, whose previous film, Zéro de Conduite, had been banned in France because of its attack on the school system. The growling, terrified Jules seems to embody aggression, but he tempers the beat when we see him tending to his feline brood or enjoying the tender attention of Juliet Barlow. Jules only sides with chaos, not malevolence – and ultimately becomes a hero. It’s funny too, of course. Who can forget the sight of Jules, acting both sides of a wrestling bout, bending and flipping on the deck of a barge? Or did he bare his chest with a cigarette perched in his navel, so that the face drawn on his stomach would turn into a living image?

Simone’s characters often have a flavor of the strange and unexpected, a roughness that suddenly turns into charm. He died in 1975, enjoying the second fame brought by his career-reviving role in The Two of Us. He was 80 years old, an elder statesman of French cinema. To his colleagues on set, Simon seemed an instinctive actor, and he hated reshoots, but his apparent spontaneity was the result of diligent preparation. He simply didn’t need a second shot. “I live the scene as a moment,” he said. “And when he dies, God himself cannot revive him.”