Death of Anouk Aimée, unforgettable actress of A Man and a Woman and Lola

The French star who played for Lelouch, Demy, Fellini and Bellocchio died today at 92.

“It’s me, it’s Lola”. Lola, that was her. Anouk Aimée, a French actress whose name instantly evoked a form of enigmatic elegance, passed into posterity for the first time, at the beginning of the sixties, by singing this song, that of Lola, written by Agnès Varda and Michel Legrand, in the eponymous film by Jacques Demy. She played a Nantes cabaret coach, in a basque and fishnet stockings, in the sensual black and white of cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who magnified her melancholic gaze, hollowed out her cheeks to give them an eternal Hollywood glamor, a vaporous aura à la Marlene Dietrich.

“After having made the whole earth dream, now she will make the angels dream.” declared on social networks Claude Lelouch, who offered him his other legendary sixties role, that of the wife ofA man and a woman, in 1966 – her character was called Anne Gauthier but she was mainly remembered as a kind of timeless feminine ideal. In this film too, a song – and its onomatopoeia reinvented as “Cha ba da ba da” – would accompany the entry of the actress (and her playing partner Jean-Louis Trintignant) into cinema legend. A man and a woman would in fact tour the world, win a Palme d’Or, an Oscar for best foreign film, and earn Anouk Aimée a Golden Globe.

When Lelouch hires the actress to film this archetypal love story, he is still a hard-pressed, unhappy director, on the verge of throwing in the towel after too many failures. But she has the aura of a great film star, acquired first in the intellectual Paris of the 1950s, where she met Jean Genet, Picasso, Prévert, then in Italy, where she joined Federico Fellini’s troupe. , who directed her in two masterpieces from the early sixties, The good life Then Eight and a half.

Daughter of parents who were themselves actors, born Françoise Dreyfus in Paris on April 27, 1932, refugee in Charente during the Occupation to escape the roundups of Jews in Paris, the young girl launched a career as an actress very early on, after meeting in the street the director Henri Calef, an acquaintance of his mother, who offered him a role in The House under the sea (1946). She was then 13 years old and kept the first name of the character she plays in the film, Anouk. The following year, Jacques Prévert himself offered her her actress name, Aimée – “because everyone loved him”, the poet will explain. The teenager and the writer met on the set of a Marcel Carné film, The flower of age, based on the true story of a revolt in a children’s prison, which remained unfinished. In the 1950s, films by Julien Duvivier (Pot-Bouille), Jacques Becker (Montparnasse 19, facing Gérard Philipe) and some meetings with young New Wave filmmakers, or similar – Alexandre Astruc for Bad EncountersJean-Pierre Mocky for The Dredgers.

After the international triumph ofA man and a womanAnouk Aimée will shoot with American filmmakers (The appointment by Sidney Lumet, Justine by George Cukor) and will meet Jacques Demy in Los Angeles for Model Shoptrue-false continuation of Lolaa film of wandering, wandering and cars which will inspire Tarantino’s fifty years later Once upon a time… in Hollywood. Then the actress will disappear for most of the 70s, a decade during which she seems to devote herself mainly to her marriage to the actor Albert Finney – her third husband, after the Greek director Nico Papatakis and the musician Pierre Barouh, met on the set ofA man and a woman.

In 1980, it was time for her big return to cinema, via the Cannes festival, where she received the Best Actress Prize for The jump into the void, prize shared with his partner in the film, Michel Piccoli – the two actors play a sister and a brother with semi-incestuous relationships, on the verge of madness. His latest film, The Most Beautiful Years of a Lifein 2019, saw her reconnect with Claude Lelouch, to whom she had always remained faithful (if we had to redo it, Viva Life…) and take up, opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant, the legendary role ofA man and a woman – always magnificent, mysterious, inaccessible, inviting us to rewatch her films to try, once again, to decipher the enigma that she seemed to carry with her from one role to another.