Michel Simon

Michel Simon played old men without waiting to become one: by Lucy Sante's Criterion piece on L'Atalante he was only thirty-nine when the film was shot, and had been bringing to life men far older than himself at least since Jean Renoir's La Chienne. Sante describes the Pere Jules he plays as the old deckhand who is the film's conscience and its comic relief at once. Ginette Vincendeau, writing on La Chienne, speaks of him as brilliantly subtle. In Vincendeau's assessment of Sacha Guitry's La Poison, Simon is Paul Braconnier, a gardener who hates his wife Blandine enough to dream of killing her. His playing in The Two of Us won the Silver Bear for actor at the 1967 Berlinale.