Her name wasn’t Aimée for nothing. In 2012 at the La Rochelle festival which paid tribute to her, Anouk Aimée, who died this Tuesday June 18 at the age of 92, confided to 20 minutes that his career “ultimately didn’t matter to him very much”. What she had always wanted was “to be loved”. And the actress of the unforgettable A man and a woman was, loved.
Married three times – to the Greek filmmaker Nico Papatakis, the musician Pierre Barouh, author of the famous “chabadabada”, and the British actor Albert Finney, she lived with Élie Chouraqui and is credited with numerous affairs (Warren Beatty, Omar Sharif …) which she has never denied. Anouk Aimée has met many men during her career.
But with Jean-Louis Trintignant his partnerA man and a woman, Nothing. And with Claude Lelouch, even less… “That’s what allowed our friendship to last nearly sixty years,” the filmmaker confided to 20 minutes when the film was released The most beautiful years of a life, which sealed their reunion in 2019. “She was my traveling companion, my forever friend,” wrote Claude Lelouch on Instagram this Tuesday. “She gave me every chance and said yes when, as a young filmmaker, the others told me no. Thanks to her and only her, I became familiar with the light. Her silhouette and her grace will forever be engraved on a beach in Normandy. After having made the whole earth dream, now she will make the angels dream. »
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But Anouk Aimée was not the type to be fooled. “The men who marked me are not necessarily the ones I slept with,” she had fun confiding to 20 minutes in 2012, drawing up a Prévert-style inventory of his most significant meetings. Among them…
Prévert, “the poet”
Jacques Prévert, precisely. Anouk Aimée, who is still called Nicole Dreyfus, was 14 years old during the filming of her first film and everyone called her Anouk, like the heroine of the film. “Prévert then told me: ‘You can’t just be called Anouk. He found Aimee. »
Papatakis, “the handsome guy”
The Greek director quickly became her first husband. She was 17 years old. “She was someone of great beauty. He immediately wanted to go out with me, but I didn’t want to, Anouk Aimée told us. Nico spent his time introducing me to interesting people, Jean Genet or… Jacques Prévert, whom I already knew. And then Queneau, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Giacometti too…”
Fellini, “the player”
Federico Fellini had seen Anouk Aimée in photos and thought she was a model. “He taught me to love being an actress, because before The good life (1960), it didn’t amuse me that much. In France, you see, we sometimes take ourselves a little too seriously. If it’s not serious, it can’t be serious… With Fellini, you had to do things seriously, without taking yourself seriously. »
Jacques Demy, “the youngster”
Anouk Aimée believed in the magic of encounters. “Jacques Demy, it was Jean-Louis Trintignant and his wife, Nadine, who is one of my oldest friends, who introduced him to me: ”There is a young boy who is thinking of you for his first film.” That’s how I became Lola. »
Claude Lelouch, “the family”
It was again Trintignant who served as go-between for A man and a woman. “We made nine films with Claude, but there was never any story between us,” she warns. Otherwise, we would have said so! We are very, very close, like a family. »
In 2012, she cited Yvan Attal, an actor who represented “the next generation”, according to her. In They married and had many children, in 2004, Anouk Aimée played his mother. “That’s what I liked, but I also find that Yvan has enormous talent. »
She could have cited Hugo Gélin, whose hand she held when he was a child and who, this Tuesday, June 18, 2024, very early on posted this message on X (ex-Twitter): “Thank you Anouk for being so sweet every time you looked at me.” Or those who followed one another to share with her at the theater the poster of Love Letters by Albert Ramsdell Gurney: Bruno Cremer, Philippe Noiret, Jacques Weber, Alain Delon, Gérard Depardieu… So many men transfixed with love for one and the same woman.
