Monkey soulmates and extraordinary talent: the man Charlie Chaplin called ‘the greatest actor in the world’

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”. This rock-hewn genius was also well known as an eccentric of the most endearing order. Simon was an animal lover and anti-vivisectionist. Père Jules’s pets in L’Atalante were rescued alley cats, and Simon adopted the kitten that curls up in the phonograph horn. But that was just one of his many animal companions. He lived in a house surrounded by forest, with his menagerie of pets: cats, dogs and birds but mostly monkeys, for whom Simon built a network of wire tunnels, allowing them free access to the whole house, which was cluttered with his esoteric collections including a hefty stash of pornography. The monkeys were Simon’s “best friends”, and he talked about his deep grief over 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 an extended period. Simon fully believed that his monkeys were morally superior to humans, and were the roles to be reversed “there isn’t a single monkey that could cut up a human being”. Strong words from the son of a sausage-maker. Simon was born in 1895 in Geneva. His family moved to Montmartre, Paris, and before he was conscripted into the Swiss Army in 1914, Simon worked as a boxing instructor, and in a cabaret show, as a comic, magician and acrobat, among other gigs. He was right at home in the city’s seedy, criminal demimonde. Out of the army, he began his acting career on the Paris stage, where he had his breakout success in 1929. Simon had a minor role as Clo-Clo, the heroine’s brother, in Marcel Achard’s play Jean de la Lune, but stole the show every night – and he played the part again on film two years later. Simon had already embarked on his film career in 1924, but it was the talkies that made him famous, because his husky voice matched his doughy face and stolid physique – meaning he was as expressive verbally as he was with physical comedy. On screen, he had an immediate charisma, which lent itself well to playing eccentric types such as Boudu the tramp. It was a role that Renoir wrote for Simon, to bring out what the film-maker identified as his complex, nonconformist nature. The film is a social satire, in which a well-heeled bookseller rescues a vagrant who has thrown himself into the Seine, and brings him into his genteel family home. The bookseller adopts the waif, but Boudu violently resists all his attempts to transform him into a polite, clean-shaven bourgeois, to put it mildly. Critics and audiences were outraged, and it was a long time before the film was acclaimed as a classic. Simon, who had a rebellious streak of his own and knew what it was to be out of favour, took the role in L’Atalante partly out of solidarity with Vigo, whose previous film, Zéro de Conduite, had been banned in France for its attack on the school system. Simon’s growling, stomping Jules seems to embody aggression, but he softens winningly when we see him caring for his feline brood or enjoying the kind attentions of Parlo’s Juliette. Jules is only aligned with anarchy, not malice – and he ultimately becomes heroic. He’s funny, too, of course. Who can forget the sight of Jules, enacting both sides of a wrestling bout, crouching and flipping on the roof of the barge? Or stripped to the chest with a cigarette perched in his navel, so that the face inked on his stomach turns into a living portrait? Simon’s characters often have this flavour of the strange and unexpected, of roughness transformed suddenly into charm. He died in 1975, basking in the second fame brought by his career-reviving role in The Two of Us. He was 80, an elder statesman of the French cinema. To his colleagues on set, Simon appeared to be an instinctive actor, who hated doing retakes, but his apparent spontaneity was the fruit of diligent preparation. He simply didn’t need a second take. “I live a scene as a moment,” he said. “And once it’s dead, God himself could not revive it.” • Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Zéro de Conduite, Taris and À Propos de Nice will be released as a boxset in 4K UHD in December