"Does one act better after one has aged?
"Well, one doesn't act better: one doesn't act anymore. One is.
The compliments you get from people who speak about 'the courage to show oneself in an unflattering aspect' are just pious remarks.
It isn't courage; it's a form of pride, possibly vanity,
to show yourself as you really are in order to better serve the character that has been offered you as a gift."
--Simone Signoret, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be, (NY: Harper & Row, 1978), 324.
This reminds me of the work of any creative act, including blogging.
Top image: Signoret, with Laurence Harvey, in Room At the Top (1959), 38 years old
Review, at the film's 50th birthday in 2009, in the Guardian.
Bottom image: I found it undated, but I imagine Signoret's signing her memoirs, released in France in 1976, when she was fifty-five
