Anouk Aimée, the French actress who has died aged 92, became a European star when she played the sultry Maddelena, the rich socialite “bored with Rome”, in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and the film director’s wife in his autobiographical 8½ (1962); she made her international reputation, however, as the beautiful young widow in Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme.
The film, a bittersweet romance between a film-script girl and a racing driver (Jean-Louis Trintignant), both of whom have recently lost their respective spouses, was the surprise hit of 1966. Released at a time of Beatlemania, race riots and anti-war protests, A Man and a Woman (as it was known in English-speaking countries) transported filmgoers to another, gentler world – a fantasy France of windswept beaches and grainy close-ups, all intercut with Francis Lai’s lush, pulsating score.
Shot by the 28-year-old director in a few weeks for only $100,000, it went on to take more than $25million at the box office and win a slew of awards – best picture at Cannes and Oscars for best foreign film and best original screenplay.
Anouk Aimée won a Golden Globe, a best actress Oscar nomination and a place in the hearts of all unreconstructed romantics who either imagined themselves in the shoes of Jean-Louis Trintignant or wished they had the actress’s striking cheekbones and potent and enigmatic sexuality.
The film led to Anouk Aimée appearing in a clutch of American-financed pictures including Justine (1969), in which she played a Jewish prostitute living in Alexandria who sleeps her way to the top. But although she remained one of the unquestioned giants of French cinema and appeared in some 70 films – working with, among others, Marcel Carné, Jacques Demy, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman and Bernardo Bertolucci – nothing she did in later life would win her the same acclaim as Un homme et une femme.
In 1986 Claude Lelouch sought to reprise the success of the original film with a more lavish update entitled Un homme et une femme: vingt ans déjà, in which Trintignant, now retired, and Anouk Aimée, a producer of big-budget epics, get together to make a film about their early love affair. Preditably, perhaps, the film totally lacked the charm of the original and bombed at the box office.
She was born Françoise Sorya Dreyfus, the daughter of two actors, in Paris on April 27 1932. Her father (who was known professionally as Henry Murray) was Jewish, and little is known of her life, or that of her family, during the war, though it appears that she spent much of it in England, where she attended St Leonard’s School at Mayfield in Sussex. There, as she recalled, she learnt “hockey and horse-riding, but left before taking my exams, because Jacques Prévert wrote Les amants de Vérone for me”.
That film was released in 1949, but in fact her film career had begun three years earlier, in 1946, when, aged 14, she was walking down the Rue du Colisée in Paris’s eighth arrondissem*nt and the director Henri Calef stopped her and asked if she would like to be in a film. “I was with my mother, on the way to see Double Indemnity with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck,” she recalled.
She made her debut in Calef’s La maison sous la mer (“The House by the Sea”, 1947). The following year she decided to take the name Anouk from the character she played in Marcel Carné’s unfinished film La fleur de l’âge (“The Flower of the Age”). When Prévert directed her in Les amants de Vérone, he suggested she add the name Aimée.
Though she was much in demand in the late 1940s and 1950s, Anouk Aimée did not fall in love with acting until she played the rich nymphomaniac in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960): “With Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, it was a big festival, a beautiful party,” she recalled.
In between that film and Fellini’s 8 1/2 she appeared as the smoulderingly sexy cabaret dancer (and single mother) of Jacques Demy’s first feature, Lola (1961). Eight years later, she worked with Demy again on a sequel in Los Angeles called The Model Shop, with Gary Lockwood, that flopped at the box office.
Although Anouk Aimée appeared in dozens of films over the years, from the 1970s she appeared almost exclusively in supporting roles, as mothers and grandmothers, often with a bare handful of scenes and little to say. While her performances were invariably models of subtlety, they hardly matched the superstar roles played by Catherine Deneuve or Jeanne Moreau.
Anouk Aimée sometimes claimed that this was because she did not always make the right choices: “I’ve taken parts I didn’t particularly like because I wanted to work with the director – Altman, for example.” (She appeared as the mistress of a fashion dignitary in his 1994 black comedy Prêt-à-Porter, which won mostly negative reviews.)
At other times she claimed that she had been disconcerted by all the public exposure that followed Un homme et une femme: “I got frightened. It was like a car that was going too fast to control. The Academy nomination, the Golden Globes. It was like too much chocolate mousse. I panicked.”
But Omar Sharif, for one, implied that there might be a different reason, when he claimed that she had given up her career several times to “follow men around the world”.
Anouk Aimée was married four times. Her first marriage, to Edouard Zimmermann, lasted less than a year. Her second, to the Greek film director Nico Papatakis, lasted three years, as did her third, to the actor Pierre Barouh, who had played her deceased stuntman-husband in Un homme et une femme. In 1970 she married her fourth husband, the British actor Albert Finney, and lived in London for seven years before that marriage, too, broke down.
In between, there were liaisons with Marcello Mastroianni, Omar Sharif and Trevor Howard, whom she met while they were on location to make a now-forgotten thriller in Tunisia in 1950.
Howard was 37 at the time and married to the actress Helen Cherry, yet his onscreen chemistry with the 18-year-old Anouk Aimée was obvious, and one night they were spotted by a journalist clearly intent on something more than rehearsing their lines. Although, under pressure from his wife, Howard dumped Anouk Aimée the moment the film crew returned to Britain, the young actress continued to pursue him.
By her 60s Anouk Aiméewas living alone in Paris with a dog and 10 cats. Like Brigitte Bardot she became a keen supporter of the anti-fur movement, but unlike Bardot she kept her looks into old age. She was proud of never having had cosmetic surgery.
In later life she won acclaim for her performance in Henry Jaglom’s Festival in Cannes (2000), in which she played an ageing screen legend attending the Film Festival who must decide whether to do a cameo in a Tom Hanks blockbuster or a more substantial lead role in a low-budget independent directed by Greta Scacchi. Later, she was Napoleon’s mother in a six-hour television mini-series about the great man (also starring Gérard Depardieu and John Malkovich), directed by Yves Simoneau.
In 2019 she came out of retirement to appear opposite Trintignan once again in Claude Lelouch’s Les plus belles années d’une vie (“The Best Years of a Life”), a third visit to the characters from Un homme et une femme; nostalgia-steeped, it was an improvement on the previous sequel.
In 2003 she received an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where she used the opportunity to step out of her role as star to advocate for peace “for the children of the world”.
Anouk Aimée had a daughter by her second husband, Niko Papatakis.
Anouk Aimée, born April 27 1932, died June 18 2024
