Actress Anouk Aimée, the elegance personified in “Lola”, “A Man and a Woman” and “La Dolce Vita”, has died at the age of 92

Actress Anouk Aimée is dead, her daughter announced on Instagram. “With my daughter, Galaad, and my granddaughter, Mila, we have the immense sadness to announce the departure of my mother Anouk Aimée. I was close to her when she passed away this morning, at her, in Paris”, wrote Manuela Papatakis on Tuesday June 18. Known in particular for her role in A man and a woman by Claude Lelouch, released in 1966, she died at the age of 92.

With the death of Anouk Aimée, a page of 20th century cinema has just closed. From Federico Fellini to Claude Lelouch, including Philippe de Broca, George Cukor, Robert Altman and Jacques Demy, Anouk Aimée has filmed under the direction of the greatest directors. And she was the partner of great actors, such as Jean-Louis Trintignant, Gérard Philipe and Marcello Mastroianni.

Forever, Anouk Aimée will remain Anne Gauthier in Claude Lelouch’s Oscar-winning film A man and a woman, released on screens in 1966. On the beach at Deauville, Jean-Louis Trintignant gets out of his Ford Mustang 184. A headlight flashes, in the background the music of Francis Lai and Pierre Barouh. “Da ba da ba da, ba da ba da ba”, the atmosphere is calm. Trintignant rushes towards Anouk Aimée. The lovers embrace, Lelouch’s camera goes for tricks and turns, and one of the most popular scenes in French cinema is born. Anouk Aimée becomes an icon.

She lights up the film with her elegance and charm. A man and a woman will become a cult film, it will have more or less successful sequels, but the reunion between the actress and Trintignant in The Most Beautiful Years of a Life, in 2019, will be a cinematic moment of great emotion as the couple has left their mark on people’s minds.

However, the start of filming in Deauville was not so simple. As Claude Lelouch declared, on the set of the television show “Vivre pour vivre”, in October 1967, in a burst of laughter: “She was bothering me with Fellini, Fellini here, Fellini there.” At that time, Anouk Aimée was leading her career in Italy, in the Roman studios of Cinecittà.

From the beginning of the 1960s, Anouk Aimée made declarations of love for Italian cinema. She who was directed by Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Antonio Lattuada or Dino Risi used to say: “I like shooting with Italian directors, I like the atmosphere. (…) We leave the actors much more free.”

Under the eye of Federico Fellini’s camera, she will shoot two films, and not the least: The good life (1960) and Eight and a half (1963). She shares the screen with Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale and Anita Ekberg. In 2009, she told the newspaper Paris Match : “Thanks to Fellini, I learned that you could work seriously without taking yourself seriously. I discovered laughter, the joy of living and I began to love my job as an actress.”

Because cinema was not a clear-cut destiny for Anouk Aimée, propelled onto the sets of the greatest directors by a series of wonderful encounters.

Backtracking. The scene takes place on rue du Colisée in Paris, at the exit of a cinema in 1945. It is still called Françoise Dreyfus, she is 13 years old and is accompanied by her mother, Geneviève Sorya, who was actress. A director, Henri Calef, passes by there. He knows his mother and addresses them: “Do you want to act in cinema? I have a role for you.” “I looked at mom and said yes,” told Anouk Aimée to The Obs, in 2014.

Without this coincidence, 20th century cinema might not have been the same. “I was very tall, looked like a filly, they gave me 16 years old”, she liked to tell. The young woman plays her first role, she will be Anouk in The House under the seathe story of a young servant in a miners’ restaurant in La Manche.

A leading role and a first name. We will have to wait for Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert to find a name for her, it will be Aimée. “You can’t be called Anouk all your life. Imagine yourself at 40! Anouk, it will be ridiculous”, Prévert said to him. The duo named her Aimée. There are worse cinema godfathers. Young Françoise now has an artist name and her acting career is launched.

Prévert is the screenwriter of Carné for The flower of age filming in Belle-Ile-en-Mer in 1947. The film will not make it to the end, but Anouk Aimée, in seven decades of cinema, will appear in nearly 90 feature films.

From 1949, with The Lovers of Verona by André Cayatte, Anouk Aimée began filming with the most prestigious directors of the time and alongside big names in French cinema.

While she was still a boarder in England in a very strict college in Sussex and she was only 17 years old, Prévert wrote her a script with Serge as her partner. Reggiani. The advertising slogan for the film read “The first Juliet [de Romeo et Juliette] who is really 15 years old. Under the light of the greatest lighting designer of the time, Henri Alekan, she is still shy and a little borrowed but the precocious actress will continue her journey.

In 1957, she toured with Gérard Philipe Pot-Bouille by Julien Duvivier; in 1958, Montparnasse 19 by Jacques Becker. Gérard Philipe is Modigliani and Anouk Aimée plays Jeanne Hébuterne, mistress of the painter with a tragic destiny. On the set, she met Yves Montand and Simone Signoret; later Prévert introduced him to Picasso and Genet. A talented directory of current artists.

With A man and a womanthe other cult appearance of Anouk Aimée is the Lola by Jacques Demy in the eponymous film. Lola, it’s Cécile, a tall brunette girl, dancer and singer working as a trainer at El Doradoa cabaret in Nantes, Jacques Demy’s favorite city.

In 2012, the actress confided to the magazine Three colours about his role and his relationship with the director: “Demy was inspired by my tendency to go from cock to donkey: oh, it’s hot, oh, I have a headache, oh, I want a cigarette.”

Anouk Aimée is summed up elegantly in this quote: it was charm, mystery and a false lightness; talent, discretion and the air of always being a little elsewhere. All the while printing characters who have become part of cinema heritage on the screens of cinemas.