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Anouk Aimée, the French actress known for her elegance and casual sophistication in films like Claude Lelouch’s “A Man and a Woman” (1966), the Fellini classics “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and “8½” ( 1963) and “8½” by Jacques Demy. Lola” (1961), died on Tuesday. She was 92 years old.
Aimée’s daughter, Manuela Papatakis, confirmed her death in a post on Instagram.
“With my daughter Galaad and my granddaughter Mila, we are very sad to announce the departure of my mother Anouk Aimée,” she wrote. “I was by her side when she died this morning at her home in Paris.”
Quite well described in one encyclopedia as a “distant but seductive screen presence”, Aimée was frequently described as “‘regal,’ ‘intelligent’ and ‘enigmatic,’ giving the actress, according to journalist Sandy Flitterman-Lewis , “an aura of disturbing and mysterious beauty which earned her the status of one of the hundred sexiest stars in the history of cinema (according to a 1995 poll by Empire magazine).
Aimée was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant in “A Man and a Woman” – one of the few actors to be so nominated for a performance in a foreign film. The film’s director, Claude Lelouch, was also nominated (he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes) and “A Man and a Woman” won Oscars for best original screenplay and best foreign language film.
The film, made on a low budget, was also a huge commercial success. Aimée plays a production assistant in the cinema sector who meets a racing driver played by Trintignant in a school where everyone has a child in boarding school.
Reviewing the 1966 film for the website DVD Verdict in 2003, Dan Mancini wrote that “A Man and a Woman” serves “as a reminder that sleek, modern Hollywood romance is not the only way to go, that Romantic films can benefit from this. the raw aesthetic of the low-budget indie. Aimée and Trintignant are pretty movie stars, but Lelouch’s style gives them both a heavy humanity, as do their performances. Like any respectable disciple of the French New Wave, Lelouch leaves his actors ample room for improvisation, to get to the heart of a scene by the path that seems natural to them. The halting nature of Aimée and Trintignant’s interactions—their hesitant eye contact, their pregnant pauses, their nervous laughter—undermines (in a good way) their sparkling beauty and movie-star mystique.
In 1965, Variety said: “Anouk Aimée has a mature beauty and an ability to project an inner quality that helps ward off the obvious banality of her character, and this also applies to the insightful Jean-Louis Trintignant as a man. »
(Lelouch reunited the two actors for 1986’s “A Man and a Woman, Twenty Years Later,” which was much less successful.)
In “Lola” from 1961, Jacques Demy’s first film, which would not be appreciated until later, Aimée plays “the seductive and naive Lola, the mysterious woman of the world who attracts the attention of a trio of lovers, in her universal portrait of a vulnerable cabaret singer abandoned in love but still hoping her man will return,” in the words of critic Dennis Schwartz. In the film, which takes place in the port city of Nantes, most of the loves are unfortunately unrequited. (Aimée reprized the role of Lola in Demy’s 1969 Los Angeles film “Model Shop,” in which her character worked in a photo studio where men could rent cameras and take photos of nude women; she meets a young man played by Gary Lockwood The New York Times stated that Lockwood’s character “meets Miss Aimée, falls in love with her and afterward much coffee house philosophy about war, marriage, love and politics.” , they are separating. “)
In Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” Marcello Mastroianni plays a journalist wandering the realm of Rome’s glamorous people while juggling numerous romantic entanglements. Marcello is attracted to Aimée’s Maddalena, who is beautiful and exceptionally wealthy but also bored and listless, and his wooing is half-hearted.
In Fellini’s “8½,” a film declared the director’s “obvious masterpiece” in a 1964 review by Esquire’s Dwight MacDonald, Mastroianni’s director goes through a professional and personal crisis after achieving great success, the leaving you nervous and unsure of what to do next. ; he seeks solace or at least escapes to a spa, but those who depend on him, including his mistress and then his intellectual, chain-smoking wife, played by Aimée, follow him. Aimée’s Luisa is, in the words of Roger Ebert, “enraged with him, as much for his bad taste in women as for his infidelity.”
The New York Times said that much is “wonderful” in the film, including “splendid and charming performances — Sandra Milo as the mistress, Guido Alberti as the producer, Anouk Aimée as the director’s jealous wife, Claudia Cardinale as the ‘girl’ dream “. “, and many others.”
Aimée also gave a memorable performance in Belgian filmmaker André Delvaux’s 1968 surrealist classic, “Un Soir, un train”, in which she starred with Yves Montand, he as a linguistics professor in Flanders, she as his lover, a French woman who designs costumes for a theater and feels uncomfortable in his alien surroundings while he shows no signs of wanting to take the next step in their relationship.
Aimée and Dirk Bogarde turned in good performances in “Justine” (1969), but the film was given to George Cukor after another director made a sort of muddle of it, and it ultimately doesn’t really work as a film .
Aimée’s appearance in Robert Aldrich’s terrible 1962 biblical epic “Sodom and Gomorrah,” in which she played the wicked queen of the Sodomites, is of moderate interest given that the actress did not appear in many English-language films.
Aimée did not work in the cinema during the first half of the 1970s, returning in 1976 for the Lelouch film “If it had to be done again”, in which she starred with Catherine Deneuve.
In Marco Bellocchio’s “A Jump into the Dark” (1980), Aimée starred with Michel Piccoli and Michele Placido, playing a woman full of depression and suicidal fantasies; after appearing to recover, she begins a relationship with a brilliant actor (Placido), who arouses the jealousy of her brother (Piccoli), a judge, whom she raised. The film won Best Actress and Best Actor awards for Aimée and Piccoli at the Cannes Film Festival, and Bellocchio was nominated for the Palme d’Or.
In Bernardo Bertolucci’s critically acclaimed 1981 film “The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man,” she played the wealthy French-born wife of a Parma cheese factory owner (Ugo Tognazzi) whose son may have whether or not to have been kidnapped.
Aimée starred in Henry Jaglom’s 2001 film “Festival à Cannes”, a satire of Hollywood intrigue at the center of which is a struggle for the services of her character, European cinema legend Millie Marguand, married to Victor de Maximilian Schell. . The New York Times said, “Most of the film’s warmest moments that don’t feel forced belong to Millie and Viktor, who have been through too much together to cheat on each other.” As they philosophize about love, marriage, passion and companionship, you feel the power of a bond formed over decades. Ms. Aimée and Mr. Schell emerge from the film with worldly dignity.
She also appeared in Robert Altman’s 1994 film “Ready to Wear,” in which she played the mistress of Jean-Pierre Cassel’s head of the French fashion commission, who died in somewhat mysterious circumstances. Aimée’s character is a great designer, and she and her son (Rupert Everett) face the prospect of selling their brand to a Texas boot magnate played by Lyle Lovett.
Nicole Françoise Florence Dreyfus was born in Paris, daughter of actor Henri Murray (born Henry Dreyfus) and actress Geneviève Sorya.
Although her father was Jewish, she was raised in her mother’s Roman Catholicism, although she converted to Judaism as an adult. She studied dance at the Marseille Opera, then theater in England, then drama and dance with Andrée Bauer-Thérond.
She made her film debut at the age of 14 in Henri Calef’s “La Maison sous la mer” (1947) (she adopted the name of her character Anouk as a stage name), and was among the stars of ” The Flower of “by Marcel Carné. age” (1947), an unfinished film whose images have disappeared; the co-writer of this film, Jacques Prévert, gave her the name “Aimée”. She played alongside Serge Reggiani in André Cayatte’s novel Roméo et Juliette “Les amants de Vérone” (1949).
The actress made her English-language debut in 1950 in Ronald Neame’s “Golden Salamander”; the poster’s tagline was “Introducing the fascinating new star discovery of the year… exotic ANOUK!” »
The New York Times said: “This film’s authentic Tunisian origins and atmosphere are its best points – those and a pretty young woman who now calls herself Anouk.” Miss Anouk (if that’s what we should call her) is a melancholy but strong and docile young girl who recently made a rather impressive appearance in “The Lovers of Verona”, a French film. And now, as a young French woman residing in a somewhat isolated Tunisian town where things are happening during this photo, she continues to draw attention to herself.
“Modigliani du Montparnasse” (1958) by Jacques Becker constitutes for Aimée a springboard towards the main roles which will soon be hers. In this tragic biopic of the artist, she plays the role of Jeanne, an intelligent and wealthy woman passionate about art who provides emotional support to the frail and older Modigliani (played by Gérard Philipe).
Aimeé’s last film was Charlotte de Turckheim’s “Damn then!” in 2012.
She won an Honorary César at the French Césars in 2002, an Honorary Berlin Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2003 and the Silver Medallion at Telluride in 2009.
Aiméé was married four times, the first to Edouard Zimmermann (1949-50), the second to Nikos Papatakis (1951-55), the third to Pierre Barouh (1966-69) and the last time to the actor Albert Finney (1970-78). ). All marriages ended in divorce.
She is survived by her daughter, Manuela Papatakis.