French screen legend Anouk Aimée dies aged 92

The French screen star Anouk Aimée has died at the age of 92.

She died at her home in Paris, her agent told the AFP news agency.

Aimée – born Nicole Françoise Florence Dreyfus – became an icon of doomed romance in the 1960s thanks to Claude Lelouch’s Oscar-winning A Man and a Woman (1966).

Her sophistication graced such arthouse European masterpieces as Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), and she was unforgettable as the ageing showgirl in Jacques Demy’s heartbreaking musical Lola (1961).

Parisian Aimée was Oscar-nominated for her work on A Man and a Woman, winning a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for her performance.

She won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980 for A Leap in the Dark.

Her other screen awards included an honorary Golden Berlin Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2003 and an honorary César – France’s Oscars – in 2002.

Born in Paris on 27 April 1932, Aimée was the scion of a theatrical family.

Her life was turned upside down when German troops marched into the city when she was eight. Her father was Jewish, putting the family in mortal danger, even though she was raised a Catholic.

“We moved all the time. We hid… But then the Germans turned up and took over the apartment downstairs,” she recalled.

The family sent her to the countryside where they hoped she would be safer, changing her name so she would not have to wear a yellow star.

Her lifelong love of animals was born from the comfort they gave her during her time in hiding, Aimée later said.

The war over, her career began at the age of 13 when she was picked to play in a Marcel Carné film that was never finished for lack of money.

She finally made her screen debut the following year and adopted her character’s name, Anouk, as her own. It would become popular in France thanks to her.

It was the French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert who convinced her to also change her surname to Aimée, meaning “loved”.

Her career took off in 1949 with André Cayatte’s The Lovers of Verona.

Her class and beauty brought her a string of roles including in Montparnasse 19 by Jacques Becker before she began to work with Demy and Fellini.

The massive success of A Man and a Woman opened the door to Hollywood, where Aimée played opposite Omar Sharif in Sidney Lumet’s The Appointment and starred in George Cukor’s Justine in 1969.

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But she stopped working for seven years after she married the British actor Albert Finney – her fourth husband – in 1970. They divorced eight years later.

“Cinema is like a meeting between lovers,” Aimée told AFP. “I love that, it’s like a gift and I adore the feeling of being loved.”

Although by the 1980s she was appearing in fewer films, she won Best Actress at Cannes in 1980 for Marco Bellocchio’s A Leap in the Dark.

The American director Robert Altman brought her out of retirement to rekindle her old spark with co-star Marcello Mastroianni in the acclaimed Prêt-à-Porter in 1994.

Aimée walked the Cannes red carpet again in 2019 for the premiere of Lelouch’s sequel to A Man and a Woman in which she and her original co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant were reunited to reprise their characters, now in their 80s.

Aimée had a daughter with the film director Nikos Papatakis. She also married the composer Pierre Barouh, who sang on the iconic soundtrack for A Man and a Woman.

She lived out the last few decades of her life in Paris’s Montmartre district surrounded by her pets.

Source: AFP