Yves Montand

Born Ivo Livi near Milan in 1921 and raised in Marseilles when his Jewish family fled Mussolini, Montand had begun performing in Marseilles music halls and had started to become a success in Paris, when Edith Piaf made him her lover and protégé, casting him in Etoile sans lumière; that same year he was a last minute replacement for Jean Gabin in Marcel Carné's superproduction and postwar follow-up to his triumphant Children of Paradise, Les Portes de la nuit. While he introduced the song Autumn Leaves in the film, it was a massive flop, starting Carné's precipitous decline.

Montand guested in a few films while conquering the music hall post-breakup with Piaf, until Henri-Georges Clouzot cast him in the nerveshredding trucking-the-nitroglycerine-over-the-mountains thriller The Wages of Fear, turning him into an international film star overnight. On stage he toured the world with his one-man show, including a six-month run in Paris, and had a theatrical success in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, with Simone Signoret, whom he had married.

In 1960 he made the move to Hollywood, starring in George Cukor's Let's Make Love with Marilyn Monroe (they did, as he later admitted.) But after several more dissatisfying films he returned to France, where he and Signoret co-starred for novice director—and their personal friend—Costa-Gavras in Sleeping Car Murders. And as the inspector who battles a cold and speaks with the accent of his native Midi, Montand achieved what he viewed as his real breakthrough as a film actor.

Alain Resnais' La Guerre est Finie, from a screenplay by Montand's friend Jorge Semprun, proved another triumph, and Montand returned briefly to English for Frankenheimer's Grand Prix, learning to drive a race car for the film. After an even more overwhelming triumph in Z, Montand returned to English and the U.S. for Minnelli's On a Clear Day You See Forever, with Barbra Streisand then topped himself with his incarnation of Stalinist victim Artur London in Costa-Gavras' The Confession (confining himself to an actual prison diet, he lost over 20 pounds in the course of shooting). And as a well-known Communist sympathizer throughout his life, although shaken by Kruschev's secret speech on Stalin's crimes, this marked his courageous public break with the party; he remained a strong public voice for freedom around the world until the end of his life.

While periodically returning to smash runs in the music hall, on screen he notably appeared again for Costa-Gavras in State of Siege and Clair de Femme, for Claude Sautet in César and Rosalie and Vincent, François, Paul and The Others, for Jean-Pierre Melville in Le Cercle Rouge, and for Claude Berri in the Pagnol adaptations Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring – a final triumph. Signoret died in 1985, and he remarried; his only child was born in 1988 when he was 67. Montand died of a heart attack in 1991.

Rialto Pictures