about whether audiences would accept a black actress as Rosaline, "I also felt that you should be allowed to fail, because if you don't take risks you can't reach higher planes" and that she had focused on her performance rather than debates around her casting, saying that "If I had thought about those things beforehand, I would not have set foot on the stage". In 1987, Simon appeared for the RSC again, in the lead role of Isabelle in Measure for Measure, directed by Nicholas Hynter. In a review of the Stratford production, Michael Coveney of the Financial Times felt that Simon "fails ... with the full range of the role. Like so many of this season's leading ladies, she is technically underpowered." Irving Wardle wrote in The Times that: The play transferred to the Theatre Royal, Newcastle, and then to the Barbican in 1988. Financial Times critic Martin Hoyle wrote of the Barbican production that Simon "has transformed her voice, both timbre and enunciation .... Incisive, vocally varied, though slightly lacking the full weight for the early emotional climaxes, she gives the best performance I have seen from her, dignified and touching." In The Times in 1991, Benedict Nightingale opined that by casting Simon as Isabella and Rosaline, and Hugh Quarshie in other plays, the RSC had been "launching two performers of huge potential". In 2014, the RSC's Head of Casting, Hannah Miller, explained that the RSC's policy was to select the best actor for the role regardless of factors including gender, race, class, and disability status. Academic Lynette Goddard argued that despite the RSC's inclusive policy, black actresses still had limited opportunities to progress, "which makes Josette Simon's case all the more compelling". Goddard commented that "the more well known Simon became, the less compelled reviewers felt to mention race". Simon told David Jays of The Guardian in 2017 that "I hate the term 'black actor' ... I'm black, which I'm proud of, but it doesn't mean anything. You're an actor, full stop." Colour-blind casting also applied when Simon played Maggie in Arthur Miller's After the Fall at the National Theatre in 1990. The character is thought to have been based on Marilyn Monroe, who was married to Miller. It was a performance that won Simon the Evening Standard'''s Best Actress award, Critics' Circle Theatre Award and Plays and Players Critic Awards. Miller attended rehearsals for two weeks,