ANOUK AIMÉE
(27 April 1932 - 18 June 2024)
Anouk Aimée, one of France’s most beautiful and best-loved actresses, has died at the age of 92. Although she made films all over the world, she remained essentially a woman of France. She was the epitome of a star actress, one who deserved to be listed alongside Bardot, Moreau, Deneuve, Huppert, Binoche, Karina and Signoret. She rose from obscurity in 1947 to enjoy the status of international celebrity who worked with Cayatte, Astruc, Duvivier, Becker, Litvak, Franju, Fellini, De Broca, De Sica, Lelouch, Demy, Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Skolimowski and Varda.
Anouk Aimée was born Nicole Francoise Florence Dreyfus in Paris to the actress Geneviève Sorya and the actor-producer Henry Murray. She had studied acting and dance as a young girl and began her film career aged 14, in Henri Calef’s La Maison sous la mer, playing a character called Anouk, a name that stuck with her professionally. In 1959 she worked with Trevor Howard in Ronald Neame’s Golden Salamander, followed by Astruc’s short The Crimson Curtain and his feature Les Mauvaises rencontres (Bad Liaisons). She made a film in Germany with O. W. Fischer and with Anatole Litvak played Eva in The Journey, about refugees fleeing Hungary after the 1956 Revolution. The cast included Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner. Franju’s La Tete contre les murs, his first feature, saw Aimée as a girl who befriends an asylum patient in a bold drama that questioned the treatment of those with mental illness.
Then came the internationally controversial La dolce vita (1960), Fellini’s satire on Roman society as witnessed by a journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) tasting the sweet life of the Eternal City. Aimée was one of several actresses on board, alongside Anita Ekberg, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noel, Nadia Gray and Laura Betti. Despite alleged censorship the film was a huge success, creating a new expression for the hedonistic lifestyle depicted in the film. Never short of a job, Aimée worked with Vittorio De Sica on The Last Judgement and with Jacques Demy on his first feature, Lola, in the title role inspired by Dietrich in Sternberg’s Blue Angel – “they call me naughty Lola”. Aimée played a dancer meeting an old flame from before the war. A charming film, it received a Bafta nomination and won a New York Film Critics special award. She worked with Demy again on Model Shop, again playing Lola, a model in a studio for erotic photographs.
Aimée joined Fellini again for his 8 1/2, after appearing as Queen Bera in Robert Aldrich’s Sodom and Gomorrah. A boost to Aimée’s career was Un homme et une femme (1966), Lelouch’s drama in which two widowed people meet at a boarding school, fall in love, but still remember their former partners. With Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant and Francis Lai’s shabba-dabba score, the film could hardly fail and it was an international success. In the UK it enjoyed a general release, hitherto unheard of by most exhibitors. It was showered with accolades - two Oscars, a Bafta win for Aimée, two prizes at Cannes and many other global awards. Its success gave rise to a sequel, Un homme et une femme - vingt ans deja, which picked up the story twenty years later. She also made Sidney Lumet’s psycho-drama The Appointment with Omar Sharif, George Cukor’s Justine (from Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet), Marco Bellocchio’s A Leap in the Dark with Michel Piccoli, and Bertolucci’s Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man with Ugo Tognazzi. She appeared in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Success is the Best Revenge, Agnès Varda’s A 101 Nights, Robert Altman’s Pret-a-porter and five more films with Lelouch including her final film appearance in The Best Years of a Life in 2019.
Anouk Aimée first married the journalist Edouard Zimmermann, then the director Nico Papatakis, the actor-producer Pierre Barouh and Albert Finney. She has a daughter, Manuela Papatakis. She enjoyed a long life and a successful career that made a huge contribution to world cinema. She will never be forgotten.
MICHAEL DARVELL