The daughter of actors, Ms. Aimée made her film debut at age 14 and remained, for seven decades and more than 80 films, a captivating and enigmatic presence on screen.
“She is a star simply because she is incredibly photogenic, incredibly provocative,” Fellini once said. “She belongs to the great masked pantheon of cinema with this face which has the same intriguing sensuality as that of Garbo, Dietrich or Crawford, these great mysterious queens, these high priestesses of femininity. Anouk Aimée represents the kind of woman who leaves you troubled and confused – until death.
Jacques Demy and Claude Lelouch were also among the directors attracted to her aristocratic beauty and Modigliani brown eyes that express suffering and tantalizing indifference.
In “La Dolce Vita” (1960), she was a wealthy, bored nymphomaniac socialite who seduces a gossip columnist (Marcello Mastroianni) and makes love to him in a prostitute’s apartment. She walks through the film in a black cocktail dress, with her hair pinned up and black sunglasses at night – a sybarite with masochistic tastes, her glasses hiding a black eye.
Three years later, with her brown hair largely shaved, Ms. Aimée reunited with Fellini for “8½,” playing the jealous and bitter wife of a director (Mastroianni) in the throes of artistic and personal crises. Widely considered Fellini’s autobiographical masterpiece, the film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and elevated Madame Aimée’s brilliance in the eyes of arthouse fans.
She played the title role in Demy’s first feature film, “Lola” (1961), playing a ravishing but not too brilliant dancehall singer who gives free rein to her charms even as her pure heart remains loyal to the long-lost lead. the love that left her pregnant.
The film failed to find a large audience, even in France, but British film critic Dilys Powell for her part showered Ms. Aimée with superlatives, noting in her “exquisite performance a being out of breath, electric, vulnerable, supremely sensual”.
For all her talents, she seemed to accept roles indiscriminately, from a dull, unfulfilled beauty in the well-received French comedy “The Joker” (1960) to the debauched queen of Sodom in the anemic biblical spectacle “Sodom and Gomorrah.” (1962). ).
“I really don’t like to work,” she told the Copley News Service in 1967, adding, “I’ve made bad films when I needed money to live well and be comfortable.” …But if I feel comfortable, I won’t make a bad movie to make more money.
Lelouch was a little-known director when he charmed Ms. Aimée into directing “A Man and a Woman” (1966), a low-budget feature for which no one – least of all the director and his star – had commercial expectations.
The romantic drama tells the story of two widowed parents, a film assistant (Mme Aimée) and a race car driver (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who carry on a near-silent affair set against the backdrop of sunset beach walks and encounters filmed in the mist. – tempered windshields.
The film was a simple love story, told with delirious camerawork and instantly canonized samba music by Francis Lai. It became a worldwide success, a cultural reference and the greatest commercial success of the actress’ career.
Although derided by critics as molasses, it won the grand prize at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Ms. Aimée was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress but lost to Elizabeth Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Nonetheless, “A Man and a Woman” set Ms. Aimée on a trajectory toward Hollywood stardom — a trajectory she quickly abandoned.
She asked her agent to take her out of the romantic thriller “The Thomas Crown Affair”, which became a box office hit starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, to allow her to direct a fantasy drama called “One Evening, One Train” (1968) with André Delvaux, a Belgian filmmaker whom she admired. “I turned down a big thing to make this Belgian film,” she later told television host Charlie Rose. “But I’m not sorry.”
Nicole Françoise Florence Dreyfus was born in Paris on April 27, 1932. Her father, Henry Murray (formerly Henri Dreyfus), was an actor and producer, and her mother, Geneviève Sorya, was an actress.
She studied dance at the Marseille Opera and excelled in horse riding at a school in Sussex, England. She made her film debut after director Henri Calef spotted her outside a movie theater and recruited her for a small role in the romantic melodrama “The House Under the Sea,” 1947.
She adopted the name of her character in this film, Anouk, and soon added Aimée (translated as “beloved”) at the suggestion of two early admirers, the screenwriter-director Marcel Carné and the poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert.
Prévert wrote him a first leading role in “Les Amants de Vérone” (1949), about a tragic love story that begins between two young people on a film set (the other was Serge Reggiani) during the filming of “Romeo and Juliet. »
The film brought him greater attention and landed him the co-starring role with Trevor Howard in a British crime drama, “The Golden Salamander” (1950). But his interest in theater waned after the birth of his daughter, Manuela Papatakis, in 1951.
Her marriages to industrialist Edouard Zimmermann, Parisian nightclub owner and manager Nico Papatakis, singer-songwriter Pierre Barouh and British actor Albert Finney ended in divorce. His daughter, who had a modeling career, survives.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Ms. Aimée appeared in various romances and dramatic dramas before Fellini cast her in “La Dolce Vita,” apparently on a whim, after seeing her photo in a magazine. . She remembers the phone conversation: “He said, ‘Do you like the role? Are you playing the role? GOOD. Bye.'”
She described him as an inscrutable genius who gave little direction. “The first week was terrible,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I was scared. I didn’t understand anything. But he’s a magician. She added: “For Fellini, I would do anything. I even cut my eyelashes for him in ‘8½’.
Her English-language career collapsed in the late 1960s with three high-profile commercial failures: “The Appointment,” as a femme fatale opposite her off-screen lover Omar Sharif, “Justine” with Dirk Bogarde and Michael York, and “Model Shop”, for which Demy had Lola transplanted to Los Angeles.
After marrying Finney in 1970, she said she considered quitting acting. But she became agitated as the marriage began to fail. Finney’s biographer Gabriel Hershman noted the actor’s womanizing and excessive drinking, as well as Madame Aimée’s insecurities and possessiveness, as major factors in the decline of their relationship. She became the companion of actor Ryan O’Neal before reappearing as an actress, notably in European cinema.
Mme Aimée made several films with Lelouch (notably “A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later”, 1986) and with Élie Chouraqui, who became her lover. She has also worked with directors as varied as Bernardo Bertolucci (“The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man”, 1981), Robert Altman (“Ready to Wear”, 1994) and Henry Jaglom (“Festival de Cannes”, 2001 ).
She won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival for the black comedy “A Jump into the Dark” (1980), in the role of the unstable sister of a nervous lawyer (Michel Piccoli). In 2002, she was awarded an honorary César for her lifetime, the highest French cinematographic award.
Her chic sophistication made her a muse of fashion designer Emanuel Ungaro in the 1980s, and she was photographed by Herb Ritts in 1995 for a Donna Karan ad campaign.
“The day you don’t seduce – nothing to do with bed or love, but enchantment – you’re dead,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. “I love the camera, I love it, we have a relationship. This is where seduction comes in.