Yves Montand

Yves Montand was born with the name of Ivo Livi in ​​1921 in the Italian town of Monsummano Terme, in Tuscany, but two years later his parents, working class, emigrated to France, partly because of their communist sympathies that did not match the recent Benito Mussolini’s rise to power. He was the youngest of three brothers. Installed in Marseille, getting ahead was not easy and Ivo, while still a child, carried out various jobs, taking advantage of the fact that he looked older, such as pastry chef, hairdresser’s assistant and worker on the docks. From an early age he was fond of movies and music, and he was a big fan of Fred Astaire’s tap-dance numbers.

At the age of 17, he became an entertainer in a music hall, where he dared to sing and impersonate actors like Fernandel or Walt Disney characters. It is at this time that his artistic name was born. Ivo becomes the more French Yves. While Montand will be a tribute to his mother, when she called him to come home, “Monta”, although it could also be seen as a premonitory name of his intention to grow up and make a name for himself in show business.

Yves takes his singing possibilities very seriously, taking classes from Marguerite Francelli, and he does well on stage, with the support of Francis Trottebas, better known as Berlingot. The producer Émile Audiffred will believe in him, and will be able to develop his career despite the outbreak of the Second World War and the need to adapt to the Vichy regime. In 1944 he settled in Paris and had a decisive meeting in his career, the singer Édith Piaf, with whom he would also have a sentimental relationship. He will be able to record her first album and sing at the Teatro L’Étoile, in addition to making his film debut with her with Étoile sans lumière (1946). From the same year is his work under the orders of Marcel Carné The Doors of the Night. Of all the moments in these years, it is his career as a singer that has been consolidated, with mythical titles such as “Las feuilles mortes” from 1949, and his association with pianist Bob Castella and guitarist Henri Crolla.

Almost by chance, in 1949, he would meet the love of his life, the actress Simone Signoret , the only woman he ever married, even though romances abounded in his life, among others with Marilyn Monroe , with whom he would film The Billionaire (1960). She divorced the director Yves Allégret , with whom she had a daughter. Together they would make the theatrical production of “The Witches of Salem”, which also had a film version, and which was based on a work by Arthur Miller , Monroe’s husband.

In any case, perhaps I have anticipated events, so going back it is necessary to point to 1953 as the moment in which Montand achieved stardom in the cinema thanks to the tense thriller The Wages of Fear , by Henri-Georges Clouzot, which triumphed in Cannes. They are also moments to grow in ideas, for those who had not had an intellectual training or had not gone through the university. His union with Signoret meant meeting, in addition to Miller, other left-wing intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jorge Semprún, and avant-garde artists such as Luis Buñuel. And he and his wife were presented with the possibility of traveling to the Soviet Union and the countries in his orbit, to represent the work of Salem. The disappointment was great, he was able to verify the horrors of Stalinism that crushed movements like the Prague Spring, so that Montand ended up evolving over the years to more liberal positions. In any case, this did not prevent him from continuing to be an artist committed to the left, as his films withCosta-Gavras , Z (1969), The Confession (1970), and State of Siege (1972). And he has jewels with great French filmmakers such as Jean-Pierre Melville ( Red Circle , 1970) or Claude Sautet ( Ella, yo y… el otro , 1970).

The thriller about a presidential assassination I… like Icaro (1979), by Henri Verneuil , or the rural diptych from 1986 based on Marcel Pagnol from The Spring of the Hills and Manon’s Revenge is impressive . Shortly before, in 1985, his wife had died of pancreatic cancer. On the set of the second film he joins his young assistant Carole Amiel, with whom he will have his only child, Valentin, who is born when the actor is 67 years old. Montand would die unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 70, when he was filming what would be his last film, IP5: L’île aux pachydermes , which would hit the screens in 1992.