Jacques André Simonet

Jacques André Simonet was born in Paris into a theatrical family and studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique. He rose to fame in Italian and French cinema in the 1960s, winning the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for Valerio Zurlini's The Desert of the Tartars and Girl with a Suitcase, and starring in Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and Donkey Skin (1970).

As a courageous independent producer, Perrin founded Reggane Films to finance Costa-Gavras's anti-junta political thriller Z (1969), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for Best Picture. Globally, he is forever remembered as the adult filmmaker Salvatore Di Vita returning to his Sicilian hometown in Giuseppe Tornatore's Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso (1988). In his later years, he directed and produced revolutionary nature documentaries including Microcosmos (1996), Winged Migration (2001), and Oceans (2009).