Anouk Aimée, star of 'La Dolce Vita' and 'A Man and a Woman,' has died (2024)

Anouk Aimée didn't like people talking about her age. When we met her in 2012 for the theatrical re-release of Jacques Demy's Lola, she began the interview with a request: "Please, let's not talk about my age. It's of no interest to anyone." What was unsettling was that, in saying that, she sounded exactly the same as Lola did, 51 years earlier. That's why it was so charming to hear her say "Lola, she's me," in the present tense, as if time had, indeed, not mattered. It was her own vain style, no doubt, this ageless present, and this style spoke volumes about the lady and the way she had steered her ship without much concern for sea spray, people's opinions or having a career, before passing away on Tuesday, June 18, at the age of 92. "We have the immense sadness of announcing the departure of my mom Anouk Aimée," wrote her daughter, actress Manuela Papatakis, in a message posted on Instagram. "I was right beside her when she passed away this morning, at her home in Paris."

She had started very early, and had thereafter never wanted to stop, except for seven years: The time of a marital interlude in London at the end of the 1960s, with the actor Albert Finney, for whom she had wished to henceforth only play one role, that of a wife, in real life.

Born Françoise Dreyfus on April 27, 1932, in Paris, Aimée was the daughter of actors but said she had not been "born into it" at all. Like a wildflower, she had grown up far from the spotlight, being partly raised by her godfather and godmother on a farm. At first, her interest in cinema was so remote that it barely existed. Fate had to force her hand, by setting her on the path of director Henri Calef, who abruptly asked her if she would like to make films. She'd never really known where the "yes" that sprang to her lips had come from.

For her first film, La Maison sous la mer ("The House under the Sea," 1946), Françoise was 13, and her character was called Anouk. The first part of her stage name was found with this first step, but the last name remained. The poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert gave that to her. The story is well known: They met the following year on the set of Marcel Carné's film La Fleur de l'âge ("The Flower of Youth"), in which she starred with Arletty, Serge Reggiani and Martine Carol. The film remained unfinished: About 20 minutes of it were edited, and only half of it was shot before the team stopped production. What remains are Emile Savitry's on-set photographs of a ravishing Anouk and the name: "Aimée" – "because everyone loved her," according to Prévert. You can't refuse a name like that.

Inventing oneself

During the war, Françoise had already stopped calling herself Dreyfus to become Françoise Durand, and thus dodge the yellow star. "Anouk Aimée" was no longer a question of survival, but it still obeyed a vital principle: That of changing one's name to invent oneself, yet without becoming something else. "I've never done a total composition. There's always a piece of me in my roles," she said. One of them, however, almost made her drop Anouk in favor of another name: Lola, that of the heroine of Jacques Demy's film. "I no longer know where Anouk begins and Lola begins, or where Lola ends and Anouk ends," she would say, even 50 years on.

Released the year after La Dolce Vita, Lola (1961) was just as much, if not more, important than Fellini's film for the cinematic emergence of Anouk Aimée, who was so unique in her nonchalance. Where La Dolce Vita was intoxicated with capturing the silhouette, the angles of a face that had lost its adolescent cheeks, a hand with long fingers wrapped around a cigarette; Lola celebrated the on-screen debut of a body, the likes of which cinema would never again forget: A dance coach in a bodice and fishnet tights, as untouched by vulgarity as Botticelli's nude Venus. It was impossible to imagine, yet Demy had done it. Aimée had simply trusted him, and didn't try to explain the miracle. She simply observed: "There are people who can do anything. Women who say 'Oh sh*t, you're pissing me off.' Some shock, others don't. Lola can do it without shocking, be rude without being noticed, because there's no vulgarity to her."

After Demy, Aimée seemed to bring a bit of Lola to all her other roles: A kind of state of grace, which allowed her to do and play everything without ever being touched by crassness or mediocrity. Not that she was ever keen on tempting fate, but the fact that she almost always played elegant women, or that she made elegant women out of everyone she played, was elegance again and again, even – and this was by no means a given – with Jean-Pierre Mocky (Les Dragueurs [The Chasers], the director's first film, which was released in 1959).

Her career soon took off internationally. At the age of 17, she starred alongside Trevor Howard in The Golden Salamander (1949), by British director Ronald Neame, the producer of David Lean's first films. In 1955 and 1956, she appeared in two German films, Ich suche Dich ("I Seek You"), by O.W. Fischer, and Nina, by Rudolf Jugert. In 1959, she played a small role in Le Voyage (The Journey), an American film by Anatole Litvak, who, six years earlier, in Un acte d'amour (Act of Love), had cast the very young Brigitte Bardot, two years Anouk Aimée's junior.

At the age of 16, Catherine Deneuve was biding her time: The blonde Bardot and the brunette Aimée embodied the two faces of French beauty abroad, and it's hard to imagine them being more different: One was the bikini-clad baby doll, with sun-kissed hair and curves. The other, the mysterious halo of dark hair, alabaster skin, the slim figure, with that single astonishing Hollywood feature of heavy eyelids under thick black eyeliner, à la Monroe.

On screens the world over

If Bardot's international aura owes little to her rare film collaborations outside France, Aimée has had a more lasting impact on screens the world over, where she found some great roles. Fewer, no doubt, than those that her absolute precision in acting and her subtle mastery of restrained emotion deserved. Fellini, unsurprisingly, was one of them: The bored middle-class woman in La Dolce Vita; the deceived but smiling wife in 8¹⁄₂. Later, Bellocchio, for whom she plays the depressed Marta, consumed by dizziness, earned her the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980 for A Leap in the Dark.

She was also courted by the US, where her charms were more unexpected (in 1962, she played a peplum-clad queen for Robert Aldrich and Sergio Leone in Sodom and Gomorrah), or were directly inspired by her aura as a fashion icon, when she played a model in Sidney Lumet's The Appointment in 1969. She was 37 at the time of the film's release, and the character aptly sums up her unique status in the cinematic landscape: The mysterious Carla, officially a model, is suspected by her jealous fiancé or husband of working as a prostitute.

On the one hand, the icon, the untouchable, the woman that seems to exist only on the glossy paper of elegant magazines. On the other, the public, purchasable, disposable body. Two contradictory – or perhaps complementary – fantasies, that have continued to shape the archetypal image that people in America often have of the beautiful French woman.

Bardot was already "the" woman in Et Dieu... créa la femme (And God Created Woman, 1956), when 10 years later Aimée became "a" woman for Claude Lelouch, in Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman, 1966): A woman, any woman (the stranger Lelouch meets on a beach, who inspires him to make the film), and eventually the one we'll never forget again – in the romance the film depicts, and from our point of view as enchanted spectators.

She played Anne Gauthier (the character's name hardly matters), a film technician, the heroine of the simplest story and one of the world's most beautiful romance films. It won hearts the world over, amassing awards, the Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and the Golden Globe for Best Actress for Aimée. Although intended as a lover's hymn for Romy Schneider, this story seemed tailor-made for the great romantic Aimée was then, and will be thereafter.

She married three times, to Greek filmmaker Nico Papatakis at 19; to musician Pierre Barouh, whom she met on the set of A Man and a Woman, for which he wrote and performed the famous "chabadabada" melody; and to English actor Albert Finney. She lived with Elie Chouraqui, had an affair with Omar Sharif, her co-star in The Appointment – so many pages of her life that she always kept under a veil of mystery, although she never forbade herself from talking about them.

A taste for secrecy

Her most eloquent expression of this was not through her own words, but those of American playwright Albert Ramsdell Gurney, whose Love Letters she – although she was no veteran of the stage – performed tirelessly on stage between 1990 and 2014; first with Bruno Cremer, then Jean-Louis Trintignant, Philippe Noiret, Jacques Weber, Alain Delon, Gérard Depardieu, etc.

Aimée loved to talk, but she despised words that reveal, decipher and deflower. She was not a woman to spell things out. When questioned about the immense success of A Man and a Woman, she was asked if she had foreseen it. She replied, at the age of 80, yet with adolescent candor: "You never know these things, but you're happy. I think that's a good sign."

On this occasion, as she had always done, she would move forward with the interview counter to any analysis or exegesis, which didn't seem to have the slightest appeal to her. Gossip had even less appeal; though no more, on the other hand, than political correctness or doubletalk did for her. Simply, she answered each question in keeping with the grammatical form of an answer, and the things she said, sometimes mischievously, raised questions three times over.

Was it the sign of a taste for the true role of the mystery woman, "a" woman – who could be any woman and yet who remains the woman we never forget? More simply, beyond any role, a taste for secrecy, and for those things that are all the more beautiful for not being explained? Perhaps, even more simply, the secret of that unrivaled, enduring elegance that made her such a unique presence, peaceful in her naturalness, yet somehow drawing the impossible substance of her mystery from her very transparency.