The French icon and Oscar-nominated actress Anouk Aimée died on Tuesday. She was 92 years old.
This late actress was best known for her role in the 1966 hit movie A Man and a Woman.
That year she also received an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe award for this role, something that opened the doors of Hollywood for her.
She was especially known for her elegance and could always be pulled by a ring. By the time she started making a name for herself in Hollywood, she was already a popular European actress appearing in several movies, including Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½ (1963) and Lola (1961).
Fellini described her at the time as a woman whose “face had the same kind of fascinating sensuality as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Cindy Crawford – goddesses of femininity”.
She was known as an actress who approached her work with a balance between “passion and melancholy”. The American director Robert Altman invited her precisely in 1994 after her retirement to make this image in the movie Fun a Porter to share.
Aimée was born Francoise Dreyfus in Paris on 27 April 1932.
Her life had barely begun properly when she and her family, equally as artistic as she, had to flee France due to German domination. It was at the height of World War II, and the Nazi regime ruled much of Europe.
She was then only eight years old, and her father was a Jew. Although she then practiced the Catholic faith, the family was in great danger.
“We were constantly moving. We hid… but the Germans arrived and took over the flat below us,” she recalled her tumultuous childhood at the time.
The family sent her to the French countryside, where they hoped she would be safer. She cherished a great love for animals throughout her life and told later in her life that animals were her only source of comfort in those uncertain years.
Her career as an actress began when she was 13 years old. She was identified on the street and asked to appear in a Marcel Carne movie. However, the movie never saw the light of day due to a lack of funding.
She finally made her screen debut the following year. This is also where her stage name came from, as she simply decided to adopt that character’s name as her own. From now on she was known as Anouk and no longer Francoise.
It was the French poet and screenwriter Jacques Pervert who convinced her to change her surname to Aimée, which means “beloved”.
Her career really took off in 1949 with her role in Andre Cayatte’s The Lovers of Verona.
The great success of A Man and a Woman led to several other roles, including roles in Sidney Lumet’s The Appointment and George Cukor’s Justine in 1969.
However, her career stalled for seven years after she married British actor Albert Finney in 1970. He was her fourth husband.
She received an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980 for her role in Marco Bellocchio’s A Leap in the Dark. In 2002 she was honored with an honorary award at the Cesar Awards, and four years later she was honored at the Cannes Film Festival for her contribution to the entertainment industry.
Aimée had a daughter with the director Nico Papatakis. She was also married to Pierre Barouh, who wrote the iconic theme song of A Man and a Woman wrote.
She lived the last few years of her life in Paris’s Montmartre district with several dogs and cats.
