Before reaching Élie Chouraqui on the phone, who made Anouk Aimée, who died this Tuesday morning, appear in several films and was her companion at the end of the 70s, we check a few dates in their shared biographies. They met in 1976 on the set of the marvelous “If it were to be done again”: he was then assistant director to Claude Lelouch and she played – in a breathtaking way – the supporting role alongside Catherine Deneuve.
This before Chouraqui gave him the main role ― that of a woman suffering from leukemia who becomes closer to her son (Richard Berry) ― in his very first feature film, “My First Love” (1978).
Then the director picks up, and he tells us another story. “We lived together after Claude’s film, and it was she who entrusted me with Jack-Alain Léger’s novel, My first love, By telling me : you have to do it! I didn’t feel ready enough yet, but she pushed me. I had lost my mother, it had traumatized me, but she told me: It will do you good to make this film! We set up a production company together, I wrote the script with Jack-Alain, and we filmed quite quickly…”
“We stayed together for 4 years and became friends for life”
He has very nice memories of the filming. “The first film we made together, at the same time a love story,” emphasizes the director. There was a lot of emotion, we were all very close on the set, with Richard Berry too, it was a family business. This allowed me to enter directing without worrying about the relationship I had with my actress who was a star…”
VideoActress Anouk Aimée dies at 92
When they fell in love in 1976, he was 28, and she was 44, an 18-year difference. When pointed out to him, Élie Chouraqui smiles: “If you had seen her when I met her the first time, frankly, you would not have asked yourself any questions! »
He will then turn Anouk Aimée several times, in “What makes David run?” » and in “Les Marmottes” in particular. They no longer live together, or rather their common story took another turn: “We stayed together for 4 years, but in reality a whole life… We got angry for three quarters of an hour and we became friends for the life. »
“In all her films, she always remained Anouk”
Of Anouk Aimée on screen or in front of his camera, he retains the memory of an actress apart, singular, unsatisfied: “She was always very worried about what she had done and what she was going to do. Anouk was not the Actor’s Studio: you had to let her do it, she had an immediate understanding of the character she was going to interpret. In all her films, even the Fellini, even the Americans, she always remained Anouk. She didn’t create her characters, we just had to transform her a little bit for the one she had to play. The public found her, she was herself, with long or short hair, playing a prostitute, a mother or an aristo. »
In 1986, when Claude Lelouch proposed to her the idea of “A Man and a Woman: Twenty Years Already”, Anouk Aimée came to consult Élie Chouraqui: “She asked me about participating in this sequel… I told her that it was a good idea, explaining to him that whatever the film ended up being, the three of them were going to end up together with Lelouch and Trintignant after this global success, it would be a pleasure to be together again . »
When we ask the filmmaker, who knew her so well outside of the film sets, to talk about what woman she was beyond the actress, the answer bursts out: “She was so dazzlingly beautiful, sweet. , and funny, we laughed a lot. She had this sense of derision, this way of putting things back in place, a defensive humor. »
Above all, he remembers what followed their romantic relationship. “Anouk was my family, she came to the house like my sisters, my brother, my nieces. To everyone she was like a sister, an aunt… She had become a Chouraqui. I know his whole family, I knew his mother and his grandmother.”
Élie Chouraqui had seen Anouk Aimée again “a few days ago”, and for him, she will remain “a myth of French and world cinema”. “However,” he adds, “she could afford to refuse huge feature films like The Thomas Crown Affair, because for her, cinema was not the most important thing. What mattered most to her was her daughter, her family, the men she loved… Her life. »
