The actress Anouk Aimée, queen of enigmatic roles, is dead

Mythical in “A Man and a Woman”, by Claude Lelouch, iconic Lola by Jacques Demy, muse of Prévert and Fellini… Anouk Aimée played a gallery of disturbing characters. She died this morning at the age of 92.

HASnouk Aimée, who died this Tuesday, June 18 at the age of 92, was a sorcerer. In interviews, she knew how, just by her look, to make the journalist believe that he was becoming what he hoped to be in her eyes: intelligent. She whispered, tucking a definitely rebellious lock behind her ear, as in A man and a woman, and we quickly realized that no director, in fact, needed to direct it. She was there, and that was enough. All his directors stood aside in front of the incredible presence that served as his talent.

She often played enigmatic and deceptive characters: the young girl, apparently frozen, who suddenly dies of pleasure in The Crimson Curtain (1953), by Alexandre Astruc, after Barbey d’Aurevilly. The wife whose husband wonders if she might not be the most famous prostitute in Rome (The appointment, by Sidney Lumet, 1969). The apparently crazy sister of a probably incestuous brother (The leap into the void, by Marco Bellocchio, in 1980, which earned him the Best Actress Prize at the Cannes Film Festival). Without forgetting, obviously, Lawrence Durrell’s heroine, who passes for a compulsive erotomaniac to better reveal herself, at the end of the Alexandria Quartet, a political activist whose solitude becomes a kind of redemption (Justine, by George Cukor, 1969). Amused and admiring by this permanent duality, Federico Fellini will perform it twice. She will embody, like Janus, vice in The good life (1960) and virtue in Eight and a half (1963). “ His face, he said, evokes the same sensuality as those of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford, these great queens full of mystery. »

At the start of the war, her parents, actors, isolated little Nicole Dreyfus in Charente to escape the roundups of Jews in Paris. And at the Liberation, they sent him to England to take acting and dancing lessons. In a restaurant where she is having lunch with her mother, the filmmaker Henri Calef spots this 14-year-old girl: she will take the first name of her character in The House under the sea (1947): Anouk. And it’s Jacques Prévert, on the set of The flower of age (1947), the unfinished film by Marcel Carné, who found this name difficult for her, but which brought her luck: Aimée. Nico Papatakis, her first husband (she also married Pierre Barouh, the lyricist of the songs ofA man and a woman, and the actor Albert Finney) introduced him to the artists who haunted Saint-Germain-des-Prés at the time. Notably Pablo Picasso. And Jean Genet who tells her he loves going out with her: her beauty attracts the eyes of the men he then tries to flirt with!

Insolent, whimsical and vulnerable heroines

Very quickly, Anouk Aimée became the muse of the pre-New Wave, with Bad Encounters (1955), by Alexandre Astruc, and Head against the walls (1959), by Georges Franju. Subsequently, she will be part of the golden age of Italian cinema and the beginning of the decline of Hollywood, multiplying, with apparent indifference, unexpected comebacks and fatal errors: she refuses, for example, The Thomas Crown Affair, by Norman Jewison, with Steve McQueen, a role written for her, to go and shoot, with Yves Montand, a lovely film – One evening… a train, by André Delvaux – where she only has, curiously, a supporting role…

Of course, his most famous film remains, by far, A man and a woman. All of France in 1966 hums “da bada bada” in theaters, seeing Jean-Louis Trintignant running towards her – in slow motion – on the beach in Deauville. Claude Lelouch, who will often make it run and not always well (if we had to redo it in 1976, Viva Life in 1984, There are days…and moons in 1990), will sign two sequels to this unexpected triumph, which has become global: the catastrophic A man and a woman: twenty years already in 1986, and the tender and pale The Most Beautiful Years of a Lifein 2019.

But it was Jacques Demy who made her immortal. With her, he inaugurates his gallery of insolent, whimsical and vulnerable heroines. In 1961, she became Lola, “the one who laughs at everything, the one who says “love is beautiful””… Lola who, behind the scenes of a Nantes cabaret, straight out of the world of Max Ophuls, one of the filmmaker’s masters, waits without wavering for the sailor of her life. Lola who we find, a few years later, abandoned and lost, in a Model Shop in Los Angeles, facing a soldier leaving for Vietnam where, as always, at Demy, “the sun and death travel together”…