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French actress Anouk Aimée, remembered for her sophisticated beauty and sensitivity in the films she starred in for some of the most important European filmmakers of the 50s, 60s and 70s, such as Federico Fellini, Jacques Demy, Sidney Lumet, Bernardo Bertolucci and Claude Lelouch , died in Paris at the age of 92. Her daughter Manuela Papatakis confirmed the news in an Instagram post.
The most remembered romantic couple in French cinema will meet again. This is how it will be in the cinephile memory, in the permanent celluloid or in the believing spirit because at the departure, on June 17, 2022, of Jean-Louis Trintignant, the departure of Anouk Aimée was known – with surprising accuracy two years later. Together they were the faces of that indelible sentimental success entitled A Man and a Woman; the film that gave Claude Lelouch the Oscar award and the Palme d’Or at Cannes and its protagonists eternal stardom and a romance that did not need words on the big screen, but did need the necessary clarification in the early 60s in life real, when they and the music of Francis Lai seemed the exact synonyms of love.
But then, for Aimée, love did not come from the hand of Trintignant but from the singer Pierre Baruch, whom she married that same 1966 and whom she divorced three years later. Before her, her second husband, the Greek director Nikos Papatakis – it was her daughter Manuela who confirmed the news of her death on her Instagram – introduced her to Pablo Picasso to impress her. They were together for ten years, and after her failed marriage to Baruch, she was married for eight years to the British actor Albert Finney.
But the romance between fiction and real life was experienced with Marcello Mastroianni, with whom he worked in two of Federico Fellini’s fundamental films: “His face has the same intriguing sensuality as that of Garbo, Dietrich or Crawford, these great mysterious queens, these priestesses of femininity. “Anouk Aimée represents the type of woman that worries you to death,” the Italian director said about her, who cast her in key roles in The sweet life (1960) and Fellini 8 and ½ (1963).
His career had begun at the age of 14 in a film by Henri Calef and, almost at the same time, he got his first leading role with Marcel Carné in Fleury de l’age in which she shares the bill with the already immensely popular Arletty for a story written by Jacques Prévert. But difficulties in post-war France meant that Carné did not complete filming and the project was shelved when half of the film had already been completed. It was a tough artistic beginning for a life that had already gone through the difficult days of World War II when her parents (also actors: he, Catholic, and she, Jewish), had sent her to the southwest of France to escape the usual raids. that were destined for deportation and death. But the film that Carné did not complete also served for Anouk (born Nicole Francoise Dreyfus) to complete her stage name thanks to the surname with which Prévert himself baptized her.
His first relevant work will come from the hand of André Cayatte with The lovers of Verona (1948) and long before Fellini defined her as the new intellectual muse of auteur cinema, she had already worked in a starring role alongside Trevor Howard in Smuggling in Tunisia and had integrated the distributions of titles such as Paris Expressby Harold French; The crimson curtainby Alexandre Astruc; Paris loversby Julien Duvivier and The lovers of Montparnassewhere he shared the bill with Gérard Philipe under the orders of Jacques Becker. Red sunset He took her early to Hollywood, where Anatole Litvak’s lens framed her in a stellar cast led by Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner and Jason Robards.
First came her role as Magdalena in The sweet lifeas the beautiful and rich heiress tired of Rome and then as Luisa, the self-conscious wife of Guido Anselmi, that director in creative crisis that Mastroianni personified for Fellini 8 and 1/2 that defined her as an actress. Between the two she will perform another of the roles of her career starring Lolaby Jacques Demy, where she plays that unforgettable cabaret dancer of the title.
A Man and a Woman brought him fame and an Oscar nomination, but it also overshadowed another important work from that same year in The season of our love, where he shared the bill with Enrico María Salerno and Gian María Volonté. Since then she has filmed with many prestigious directors (George Cukor, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sidney Lumet, Agnès Varda) and she won the Best Actress award at Cannes for Jump into the void, by Marco Bellocchio.
He even met Mastroianni again in front of the cameras three decades later, summoned by Robert Altman to Ready-to-wear. But if something returned to her life, it was the constant revisiting of that love story between a young widow and a racing driver that provided two sequels, A man and a woman 20 years later (1986), and what will be his farewell to cinema: The most beautiful years of a life (2016): “I needed the two timeless faces of Anouk and Jean-Louis. I needed to capture a perspective of life through the journey of two characters, played by two exceptional actors,” Lelouch recalled when revisiting half a century after the beginning, the role that turned Anouk Aimée into a timeless brand and a legend.
