Anouk Aimee

Daughter of actors, Henry Murray and Geneviève Sorya, and born in Paris in 1932, the real name of the actress is Nicole Françoise Florence Dreyfus. Her Jewish background made it convenient for her to be sent to the camp during World War II, and she managed to blend in under the radar at the time of the Nazi occupation by taking her mother’s real last name, Durand.

Her acting career started at the age of 14 by chance, when the director Henri Calef saw her walking down the street with her mother Geneviève. That young lady caught her attention to the point of offering her a role in La maison sur la mer (1947), a film that depicted the hard life of miners. Her character was called Anouk, and from there she took her stage name, which she would complete with the last name Aimée, due to Jacques Prévert , screenwriter of another film by the fledgling actress shot that same year, La fleur de l’ âge . The young woman would study dramatic art and dance, and she would also see the world by going to England for a while.

She was a precocious young woman, without a doubt, since she married Edouard Zimmermann two years later, a very brief marriage with a rather hectic love life, which included numerous romances and a total of four weddings. Her successive husbands were, in addition to the aforementioned Zimmermann, the Ethiopian filmmaker with a Greek surname who gave her only daughter Manuela, Nikos Papatakis, also the owner of a cabaret, and who introduced her to artists and intellectuals such as Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. ; the composer of soundtracks for the cinema Pierre Barouh; and British actor Albert Finney .

With such a background it is not surprising that she gave life to a young Juliet in The Lovers of Verona , where her Romeo in this more or less free version of William Shakespeare ‘s work was Serge Reggiani . Romantic love stories of various kinds run through Aimée’s filmography. The lovers of Montaparnasse ( Jacques Becker , 1958), an approach to the painter Amadeo Modigliani, stand out in this sense ; the Roman look at a paparazzo by Federico Fellini in La dolce vita (1960); Jacques Demy ‘s cabaret Lola (1961); and of course, the Claude Lelouch tapewhich won 2 Oscars, in addition to earning her a nomination for her performance opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant , A Man and a Woman . In addition, in 1963, for Dino Risi , she played the bittersweet Vittorio Gassman , opposite Vittorio Gassman , and repeating with Trintignant; another with whom she repeated that year is Fellini, in another of her masterpieces, Fellini 8 and 1/2 .

The list of prestigious and somewhat exotic directors with whom the actress has worked is surprising, since it includes Vittorio De Sica , Alessandro Blasetti , Jean-Pierre Mocky , Robert Aldrich , Élie Chouraqui , Jerzy Skolimowski , Agnès Varda … With Omar Sharif , and under the orders of Sidney Lumet he shot A Date (1969) in English, which is far from memorable. The truth is that her American adventure was not very lucky, and thus she did not get along very well with George Cukor in Justine .(1969). In fact, she had a seven-year film hiatus, until she returned again with Lelouch in If It Started Again! (1976). He undoubtedly felt more comfortable with French or Italian filmmakers, like Marco Bellocchio , who directed her in Leap into the Void (1980) alongside Michel Piccoli , a role that won an award at Cannes, or Bernardo Bertolucci , The Story of a Ridiculous Man ( 1981).

Aimée never stopped working, but the nineties are years of small roles, like the one in Prêt-à-porter (1995) for Robert Altman . Although there are always exceptions to her, like The Shadow of the Past (2000), a kind of exploration of her Jewish origins by giving life to a Holocaust survivor. Her last great composition for the cinema was in Silencio de amor (2011), where she played the small but juicy role of a nurse.

Curiously, in theater, after an early attempt at the beginning of his film career, he would not return to a stage until the 90s of the last century, with Love Letters, which he has represented along with actors such as Gérard Depardieu , Alain Delon or Trintignant.