Anna Karina

Born in 1940 in Solbjerg, on the outskirts of the Danish city of Aarhus, Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer – her real name – hitchhiked to Paris in the late 1950s, fleeing the abuse of her violent stepfather. After beginning a long journey of hers as a model, the designer Coco Chanel was the one who proposed that she use Anna Karina as her stage name , which inevitably reminded her of “Anna Karenina” by  Leo Tolstoy .

The director Jean-Luc Godard was dazzled by the young woman, whom he discovered in a soap ad. He proposed a small role in At the End of the Escape , her debut, but she turned him down. “He wanted me to show my breasts on the screen and I refused,” he explained in an interview. Faced with her refusal, the director decided to eliminate the character from the script. She opted to star in Michel Deville ‘s Tonight or Never .

Goddar again offered her a job in his next film, The Little Soldier , and she accepted. Anna Karina ‘s mother had to pay for a plane ticket from Copenhagen , because as she was still a minor, she had to give her approval and stamp her signature on the contract. By showing torture during the Algerian War, the tape was banned in France. Between the key director of the New Wave and his muse, love arose. During the filming of their next joint work, A woman is a woman , from 1961, they both got married. For the film she received the female performance award at the Berlin Festival. She continued working with the filmmaker during the time that her marriage lasted, in  Banda aparte ,  Pierrot, el loco,  Lemmy against Alphaville  and  Origen USA ,  but after the breakup, in 1967, they did not collaborate again.

With another of the movement’s greats, Jacques Rivette , he worked on La religiosa , Palme d’Or at Cannes, and had a brief role in Cleo, from 5 to 7 , by another of the great filmmakers of the time, Agnès Varda . She worked with  Luchino Visconti  in  El Extranjero  opposite  Marcello Mastroianni , in  George  Cukor ‘s Justine ,  and Rainer Werner Fassbinder ‘ s Chinese Roulette . One of his films with the greatest international impact was The Magus , with Michael Caine and Anthony Quinn .. She came to be under the command of the Swedish maestro Ingmar Bergman  in the play that would later lead to the film After the Rehearsal , where she was replaced by another actress.

In the 1980s and 1990s his career languished. She had time to write three novels, and made her directorial debut with Vivre ensemble , followed by Victoria , which led to her retirement from the screens in 2003. She used to maintain sentimental relationships with film personalities, such as actors Pierre Fabre and Daniel Duval  and the actor and filmmaker Dennis Berry .