“From time to time Anouk Aimee has been on the verge of great success in American or British films. She has been flirted with more than most of her compatriots but she has never responded with much enthusiasm. ‘ I was never an actress with a flame’ she said once. She admits to having lost all interest in her career when her daughter was born in 1951 and probably not have persevered at all had her romantic life gone smoothly. She might have disappeared from public view years ago had not producers and directors sought her out: for even when she is not trying, she has something of the same magical femininity as Ingrid Bergman” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars 2 – International Years” (1972)
Anouk Aimee was born in Paris in 1932. She made her film debut in 1947 in “La Maison sous le mer”. Three years later she made her UK debut on film in “Golden Salamander” with Trevor Howard. She starred in “La Dolca Vita” and “Lola”. In 1966 she had a giant international hit with “A Man and a Woman”. This resulted in offers from Hollywood and she made “Model Shop” and “Justine” in the U.S. She then retunred to European film making.
“Jewish Woman’s Chronicle:
Anouk Aimée is perhaps best known for her remarkable presence as an icon of cool, sophisticated beauty in more than seventy films across seven decades, including such classics as Alexandre Astruc’s Le Rideau Cramoisi (The Crimson Curtain, 1952), Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), Jacques Demy’s Lola (1963), André Delvaux’s Un Soir, un Train (One Evening, One Train, 1968), George Cukor’s Justine (1969), Bernardo Bertolucci’s Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), Robert Altman’s Prêt à Porter (Ready to Wear, 1994) and, most unforgettably, Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman, 1966) opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant—a film that virtually reignited the lush on-screen romance in an era of skeptical modernism. Words like “regal,” “intelligent” and “enigmatic” are frequently associated with her, giving Aimée an aura of disturbing and mysterious beauty that has earned her the status of one of the hundred sexiest stars in film history (in a 1995 poll conducted by Empire Magazine).Her striking features are known to many who have never seen her films. The much-vaunted comparison with Jacqueline Kennedy is more than physical; film historian Ginette Vincendeau notes that Aimée’s films “established her as an ethereal, sensitive and fragile beauty with a tendency to tragic destinies or restrained suffering.”
While little is known of her Jewish background, it is in one of her most recent roles as a Holocaust survivor returning to Auschwitz, in Marceline Loridan’s directorial debut (at age seventy-five), La Petite prairie aux bouleaux (The Little Meadow of Birch-Trees, 2002), that Anouk Aimée brilliantly dramatizes her identity as a Jewish woman. Herself only a young girl during the German occupation of France and the Vichy regime, each with its specific program of antisemitic persecution, Aimée is a perfect fit for Loridan’s autobiographical work. (Loridan was a fourteen-year-old inmate of Auschwitz). At the New York City screening of the film in the spring of 2003, Aimée was still reticent about her own life during the war (she referred to a relative who had been deported and killed but stopped short of saying what she herself experienced), yet she spoke with eloquence and animation about the importance of documenting this chapter of Jewish history.
Anouk Aimée was born Françoise Sorya on April 27, 1932 in Paris. Both her parents were actors; her mother, Geneviève Sorya, was not Jewish, but her father, Henry Dreyfus (who used the name Henry Murray professionally), was. There may be some connection to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, but this has never been elaborated. She was referred to variously as Françoise Sorya, Françoise Dreyfus or Nicole Dreyfus until her acting career (begun when she was just fourteen, with a role in Henri Calef’s La Maison sous la mer [The House by the Sea, 1947]) earned her the name by which she is known. At first she was simply Anouk, taken from the character she played in Marcel Carné’s unfinished film La Fleur de l’âge (The Flower of the Age); it was the poet Jacques Prévert, writing André Cayatte’s Les Amants de Vérone (The Lovers of Verona, 1949) specifically for her, who playfully added the symbolic last name that would forever associate her with the affective power of her screen roles.Already talented as a child, Aimée studied acting and ballet in Paris, London and Marseilles; her training in dance at the famous Bauer-Therond school prepared her for future roles as a performer in such films as Lola and The Model Shop (Demy, 1969).
Anouk Aimée has been making films all her life; during the 1980s and 1990s, when other actresses had difficulty finding roles for “mature” women, she made one film a year and she continues now into the twenty-first century. (“You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older,” she said in 1988.)
In 2003 she was awarded an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where she used the opportunity to step out of her role as star to advocate for peace “for the children of the world.” Even though she has been referred to as “ageless,” “a legend,” and “a goddess of cinema mythology,” quite possibly her role in The Little Meadow of Birch-Trees (based on the real-life experience of its maker, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, as a teenage prisoner in Birkenau), so close to her own experience as a Jewish woman who comes to terms with her wartime past, contributed to the way she sees herself now, as an icon of world peace and reconciliation rather than the enigmatic diva of the European art cinema.
Her career can be roughly divided into three phases—the early arthouse avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s in which she defined a new kind of modern heroine; the period of international stardom, initiated by the Academy Award nomination and Best Foreign Film award and the Golden Globe for Un Homme et une femme and marked by work with many of world cinema’s most talented directors; and the phase of the committed woman, still beautiful but less concerned with screen presence than with using her position and her fame to make a difference in the world. Her three marriages loosely correspond to these time periods; she was briefly married to director Nikos Papatakis (1951–1954), then to composer Pierre Barouh (Baruch) from 1966 to 1969 (who appeared with her when she received the Golden Globe for Un Homme et une femme), and finally to actor Albert Finney (1970–1978), when she seems to have semi-retired from acting for a while.
But it is as a single woman for the last twenty-five years that Aimée has solidified her reputation both as a major actress with international appeal and as a champion of human rights. She lives in the Montmartre section of Paris with her daughter Manuela, continuing to demonstrate her “distinctive combination of melancholy and passion” in films that match the intensity of her beauty with the complexity of mature roles..
The telegraph obituary in 2024.
Anouk Aimée, the French actress who has died aged 92, became a European star when she played the sultry Maddelena, the rich socialite “bored with Rome”, in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and the film director’s wife in his autobiographical 8½ (1962); she made her international reputation, however, as the beautiful young widow in Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme.
The film, a bittersweet romance between a film-script girl and a racing driver (Jean-Louis Trintignant), both of whom have recently lost their respective spouses, was the surprise hit of 1966. Released at a time of Beatlemania, race riots and anti-war protests, A Man and a Woman (as it was known in English-speaking countries) transported filmgoers to another, gentler world – a fantasy France of windswept beaches and grainy close-ups, all intercut with Francis Lai’s lush, pulsating score.
Shot by the 28-year-old director in a few weeks for only $100,000, it went on to take more than $25 million at the box office and win a slew of awards – best picture at Cannes and Oscars for best foreign film and best original screenplay.
Anouk Aimée won a Golden Globe, a best actress Oscar nomination and a place in the hearts of all unreconstructed romantics who either imagined themselves in the shoes of Jean-Louis Trintignant or wished they had the actress’s striking cheekbones and potent and enigmatic sexuality.
The film led to Anouk Aimée appearing in a clutch of American-financed pictures including Justine (1969), in which she played a Jewish prostitute living in Alexandria who sleeps her way to the top. But although she remained one of the unquestioned giants of French cinema and appeared in some 70 films – working with, among others, Marcel Carné, Jacques Demy, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman and Bernardo Bertolucci – nothing she did in later life would win her the same acclaim as Un homme et une femme.
In 1986 Claude Lelouch sought to reprise the success of the original film with a more lavish update entitled Un homme et une femme: vingt ans déjà, in which Trintignant, now retired, and Anouk Aimée, a producer of big-budget epics, get together to make a film about their early love affair. Preditably, perhaps, the film totally lacked the charm of the original and bombed at the box office.
She was born Françoise Sorya Dreyfus, the daughter of two actors, in Paris on April 27 1932. Her father (who was known professionally as Henry Murray) was Jewish, and little is known of her life, or that of her family, during the war, though it appears that she spent much of it in England, where she attended St Leonard’s School at Mayfield in Sussex. There, as she recalled, she learnt “hockey and horse-riding, but left before taking my exams, because Jacques Prévert wrote Les amants de Vérone for me”.
That film was released in 1949, but in fact her film career had begun three years earlier, in 1946, when, aged 14, she was walking down the Rue du Colisée in Paris’s eighth arrondissement and the director Henri Calef stopped her and asked if she would like to be in a film. “I was with my mother, on the way to see Double Indemnity with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck,” she recalled.
She made her debut in Calef’s La maison sous la mer (“The House by the Sea”, 1947). The following year she decided to take the name Anouk from the character she played in Marcel Carné’s unfinished film La fleur de l’âge (“The Flower of the Age”). When Prévert directed her in Les amants de Vérone, he suggested she add the name Aimée.
Though she was much in demand in the late 1940s and 1950s, Anouk Aimée did not fall in love with acting until she played the rich nymphomaniac in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960): “With Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, it was a big festival, a beautiful party,” she recalled.
In between that film and Fellini’s 8 1/2 she appeared as the smoulderingly sexy cabaret dancer (and single mother) of Jacques Demy’s first feature, Lola (1961). Eight years later, she worked with Demy again on a sequel in Los Angeles called The Model Shop, with Gary Lockwood, that flopped at the box office.
Although Anouk Aimée appeared in dozens of films over the years, from the 1970s she appeared almost exclusively in supporting roles, as mothers and grandmothers, often with a bare handful of scenes and little to say. While her performances were invariably models of subtlety, they hardly matched the superstar roles played by Catherine Deneuve or Jeanne Moreau.
Anouk Aimée sometimes claimed that this was because she did not always make the right choices: “I’ve taken parts I didn’t particularly like because I wanted to work with the director – Altman, for example.” (She appeared as the mistress of a fashion dignitary in his 1994 black comedy Prêt-à-Porter, which won mostly negative reviews.)
At other times she claimed that she had been disconcerted by all the public exposure that followed Un homme et une femme: “I got frightened. It was like a car that was going too fast to control. The Academy nomination, the Golden Globes. It was like too much chocolate mousse. I panicked.”
But Omar Sharif, for one, implied that there might be a different reason, when he claimed that she had given up her career several times to “follow men around the world”.
Anouk Aimée was married four times. Her first marriage, to Edouard Zimmermann, lasted less than a year. Her second, to the Greek film director Nico Papatakis, lasted three years, as did her third, to the actor Pierre Barouh, who had played her deceased stuntman-husband in Un homme et une femme. In 1970 she married her fourth husband, the British actor Albert Finney, and lived in London for seven years before that marriage, too, broke down.
In between, there were liaisons with Marcello Mastroianni, Omar Sharif and Trevor Howard, whom she met while they were on location to make a now-forgotten thriller in Tunisia in 1950.
Howard was 37 at the time and married to the actress Helen Cherry, yet his onscreen chemistry with the 18-year-old Anouk Aimée was obvious, and one night they were spotted by a journalist clearly intent on something more than rehearsing their lines. Although, under pressure from his wife, Howard dumped Anouk Aimée the moment the film crew returned to Britain, the young actress continued to pursue him.
By her 60s Anouk Aimée was living alone in Paris with a dog and 10 cats. Like Brigitte Bardot she became a keen supporter of the anti-fur movement, but unlike Bardot she kept her looks into old age. She was proud of never having had cosmetic surgery.
In later life she won acclaim for her performance in Henry Jaglom’s Festival in Cannes (2000), in which she played an ageing screen legend attending the Film Festival who must decide whether to do a cameo in a Tom Hanks blockbuster or a more substantial lead role in a low-budget independent directed by Greta Scacchi. Later, she was Napoleon’s mother in a six-hour television mini-series about the great man (also starring Gérard Depardieu and John Malkovich), directed by Yves Simoneau.
In 2019 she came out of retirement to appear opposite Trintignan once again in Claude Lelouch’s Les plus belles années d’une vie (“The Best Years of a Life”), a third visit to the characters from Un homme et une femme; nostalgia-steeped, it was an improvement on the previous sequel.
In 2003 she received an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where she used the opportunity to step out of her role as star to advocate for peace “for the children of the world”.
Anouk Aimée had a daughter by her second husband, Niko Papatakis.
Anouk Aimée, born April 27 1932, died June 18 2024