French actress Anouk Aimée, nominated for an Oscar for A Man and a Woman, by Claude Lelouch, in 1967, died this Tuesday at the age of 92 in her home in Paris, as announced by her daughter, the actress Manuela Papatakis (born from her second marriage, with the director Nikos Papatakis), in a message Instagram: “We have the immense sadness of announcing the departure of my mother. “I was next to her when he died in her house.”
The face of Aimée, whose real name was Nicole Françoise Florence Dreyfus, marked decades of French cinema, thanks to her enigmatic gaze, her beauty, her acting talent and her nose for choosing good scripts, putting herself at the service of geniuses of auteur cinema such as Federico Fellini, Jacques Demy or Claude Lelouch. With Lelouch she was the one with whom she became a legend by co-starring with Jean-Louis Trintignant A Man and a Woman (1966), a film that has aged not very well, but that at the time became a worldwide phenomenon, to the point that Aimée was nominated for an Oscar. In 2019 Trintignant, Aiméé and Lelouch met again in The most beautiful years of a life, the closing of the love story between the racing driver Jean-Louis Duroc and the script Anne Gauthier. In addition, the composer Francis Lai, who died after finishing this score in November 2018, repeated on the soundtrack, and who recovered the mythical “dabadabada”. With Aimée’s death, only Lelouch remains of this creative quartet.
Born in the French capital in 1932, Nicole Dreyfus was the daughter of actors. As her father was Jewish and her mother was Catholic, as a child she adopted her mother’s maiden name, Sorya, to move freely through occupied France: she studied dance at the Marseille Opera. . She began a film career very young, at the age of 14 in The house under the sea. From there she took advantage of her character’s first name, Anouk, to rename herself, and her last name (Aimée, beloved in French) was proposed to her by the poet Jacques Prévert, who in 1949 wrote the adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, by Shakespeare, for the film The lovers of Verona, which was the first leading role for the actress.
During the following decade he chained all types of jobs, such as The lovers of Montparnasse, by Jacques Becker, o Red sunset, by Anatole Litvak, until her career exploded for her role as Maddalena in The sweet life in 1960. Maddalena became the reflection of the liberated sexuality of a bohemia that would mark the art and cinema of the sixties. The following year Aimée filmed with Jacques Demy Lolawhich would leave an indelible mark on him: “I no longer know where Anouk begins and where Lola begins, where Lola ends and where Anouk ends,” he says. The world which he claimed 50 years after the film’s release. In 1963 she appeared in Fellini 8 1/2, and in 1966 he gained worldwide fame, beyond auteur cinema, with the blockbuster A Man and a Woman, which earned him a Golden Globe, a Bafta and an Oscar nomination. It would be her great success, and its sequel decades later, The most beautiful years of a life, the last of his 92 works for film and television.
His long career knew no rest: he worked with Bernando Bertolucci in The story of a ridiculous man, acted in Justine, but George Sugar, An appointmentthe Sidney Lumet, and Ready to wearde Robert Altman, Jump into the void, by Marco Bellocchio (with which she won the award for best actress at the 1980 Cannes festival); in The shadow of the past, already in 2003, she played a Holocaust survivor who returns to Auschwitz 60 years after World War II; and under the direction of Yvan Attal she was in They married and had many children (2004).
In The Guardian, In 2007, he revealed about his acting style: “It was Fellini who taught me this: the most important thing of all is to listen, to hear what the other characters say. And don’t take (yourself) too seriously.” Among other awards, the Honorary César of 2002 and the Honorary Golden Bear of the Berlinale of 2003 stand out.
Aimée was married four times. The first time she was in 1949 with the journalist Edouard Zimmermann, for a year and a half, which was followed a year later by the aforementioned union of her with Papatakis. In 1966 she married the music producer Pierre Barouh, and, already in 1970, her last marriage came, with the British actor Albert Finney.