Anouk Aimée, the Oscar-nominated French actress who starred in classics like La Dolce Vita and A Man and a Woman, passed away this month in Paris. She was 92.
The younger generation might not know who Anouk Aimée was, but her impact on pop culture is prominent. This March, Chanel's handbag ad starring Penélope Cruz and Brad Pitt paid tribute to A Man and a Woman, with Cruz trying to capture Aimée’s mysterious and nonchalant charm.
Anouk Aimée was born in 1932 into a wealthy Jewish family; her father was an actor and producer, and her mother was also an actress. This background paved the way for her acting career. She had mentors from an early age: the great director Marcel Carné suggested she change her name to Aimée (translated as “beloved”), and the famed poet/screenwriter Jacques Prévert crafted the romance film The Lovers of Verona for her exclusively.
In the 1950s, she starred in a series of mediocre romance films. It was the attention from great directors that elevated her to goddess status. In Jacques Demy's debut feature Lola (1961), she played a dancer who appeared to be open to everyone but was deep down obsessed with an old lover. Her performance, balancing lightness and sorrow, lingered in the audience’s mind, becoming a classic image in French New Wave cinema.
Italian master director Federico Fellini's two masterpieces provided her with two of her most challenging roles. In La Dolce Vita (1960), she played an elegant, weary, unsatisfied Italian heiress who offered her embrace to Marcello Mastroianni's gossip journalist but abandoned him when he truly needed her.
In 8½(1963), she portrayed the long-suffering wife of the film's philandering director (again played by Marcello Mastroianni). To play this tormented role, Aimée even plucked out her eyelashes. “I would do anything for Fellini.” She Said.
Aimée's greatest success came from the 1966 film A Man and a Woman. When newcomer director Claude Lelouch invited Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant to star in this romance about a middle-aged widowed couple (a production assistant and a race car driver), no one expected the film to be a huge success.
However, the enchanting cinematography, the captivating soundtrack, and the star power of Aimée and Trintignant brought it a huge global success. It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and later the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Aimée also received her only Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for this film, ultimately losing to Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
After A Man and a Woman, Hollywood did reach out to Aimée, but she was not a highly ambitious actress. Steve McQueen, Hollywood's No. 1 male star at the time, invited her to star in the heist movie The Thomas Crown Affair, but she turned it down. The role later went to American actress Faye Dunaway, and the film achieved great box-office success.
Yet Aimée also found success in her comfort zone. In 1969, she and Jacques Demy continued the story of Lola in Los Angeles—although the resulting film, Model Shop, was not well-received at the time, it has garnered a following in recent years, including fans like Quentin Tarantino.
In 1980, Aimée won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her portrayal of a capricious woman in the black comedy A Leap in the Dark.
Her last memorable performance was in 2019's The Best Years of a Life, where she reunited with Lelouch and Trintignant. This sequel to A Man and a Woman depicts Trintignant's character Jean-Louis suffering from Alzheimer's over fifty years later, remembering only his old love Anne (played by Aimée). To fulfill Jean-Louis's wish, his son contacts Anne, rekindling their long-lost romance.
Following her death, French Culture Minister Rachida Dati mourned on Twitter: "We bid farewell to a world-famous icon, to a great actress of French cinema who took on roles for some of the biggest names, such as (Jacques) Demy, Lelouch and (Federico) Fellini."
Fellini himself also praised Aimée during his lifetime: "She’s a star quite simply because she is amazingly photogenic, amazingly provocative," Fellini said. "She belongs to the great masked pantheon of the cinema with this face that has the same intriguing sensuality as that of Garbo, Dietrich, or Crawford, those great, mysterious queens, those high priestesses of femininity. Anouk Aimée represents the type of woman who leaves you flustered and confused — to death."
Alejandro Franco "Arlequin"
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