Lillian Hellman’s souring over Signoret’s 1962 French staging of The Little Foxes

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Lillian Hellman’s souring over Signoret’s 1962 French staging of The Little Foxes

Simone Signoret / The Little Foxes (French production) / 1960s

In 1962 Simone Signoret undertook the translation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes into French and mounted a Paris production at the Théâtre Sarah‑Bernhardt in which she played the lead role of Regina. The production ran for six months, a commercial success that nevertheless provoked artistic friction: though scholars selected by Hellman approved Signoret’s translation, Hellman herself was displeased with the adaptation. The clash is a small but telling episode of international theatrical politics—an established American playwright balking at a celebrated French actress’s domestic reworking of a canonical play. It left an awkward footnote in Signoret’s theatrical résumé and is a reminder that transatlantic transfers of text and authority in mid‑century theatre could produce publicized artistic spats even when the production itself prospered onstage.