which included a weekly salary even though her first American film was released more than a year after her arrival in the country, Simon's films for 20th Century Fox were only moderately successful. Among others, she was cast in the Janet Gaynor role in the 1937 remake of the silent classic Seventh Heaven (1927), which co-starred James Stewart and flopped. Afterwards, she was cast in Danger – Love at Work (1937), but due to her heavy French accent she had to be replaced by Ann Sothern. Failing in finding her appropriate roles, the studio allowed her to go on an eight-week vacation to France, and following her return in June 1937, she was assigned to Suez (1938), but the project was shelved and she was eventually replaced. In the late 1930s, Simon returned to France, dissatisfied with the development of her American film career and the backfiring of its related publicity. There, she appeared in the Jean Renoir film La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast) in 1938. With the outbreak of World War II, she returned to Hollywood and worked for RKO Radio Pictures where she achieved her greatest successes in English language cinema with The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Cat People (1942) and The Curse of the Cat People (1944); the latter two formed part of the horror film series produced by Val Lewton. At the time, due to her relative obscurity in the United States, Simon generated a series of apocryphal rumors about her origins, such as that she was the love child of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst, and that she had been a Paramount stock player from Salem, Oregon. These films did not lead to greater success and she languished in mediocre films until the end of the war. She returned to France to act, and appeared in La Ronde (Roundabout, 1950). Her film roles were few after this and she made her final film appearance in 1973. Personal life and death Simon never married. It was alleged by her secretary that she gave a gold key to her boudoir to any man she was interested in, including George Gershwin. However, as film historian Greg Mank reports in his audio commentary for the DVD of Cat People, the secretary was then on trial for extorting money from her employer, and her word on this matter cannot be taken at face value (the secretary was