Born in Paris in 1932, real name Nicole Francoise Florence Dreyfus, daughter of two actors – Henri Dreyfus (alias Henry Murray) and Genevieve Sorya (née Genevieve Durand) – she made her debut on the set at a very young age, just 13 years old in ‘La Maison sous la mer’ ( 1946). Her character was called Anouk and this became her stage name: Jacques Pre’vert gave it to her. The story is known. They met the following year on the set of Marcel Carne’s film, ‘La Fleur de l’age’, in which she starred with Arletty, Serge Reggiani and Martine Carol. The film remained unfinished: about twenty minutes were edited and half shot, before production stopped. What remained were the stage photographs of Emile Savitry which portrayed an enchanting Anouk, very full of herself at the time, and this name: “Aime’e”, “because everyone loved her”, according to Prevert. A star was born: Anouk Aimée.
After the first minor appearances, he stands out for some valid performances under the direction of Andre’ Cayatte (‘The Lovers of Verona’, 1949) and Alexandre Astruc (‘The Scarlet Tent’, 1953) before reaching consecration with Federico Fellini , who directed her in ‘La dolce vita’ (1960) and ‘8’ (1963). In France she achieved great success directed by Jacques Demy in ‘Lola – Donna di vita’ in 1961 (a role she loved very much: “I no longer know where Anouk begins and where Lola begins, where Lola ends and where Anouk ends”, she still said fifty years later) before the international consecration that came in 1966 with ‘A Man, a Woman’ by Claude Lelouch, alongside Jean-Louis Trintignant and Pierre Barouh, who was her husband between 1966 and 1969.
Followed by ‘The Lost Lover’, ‘One Evening, a Train’, both from 1968, and ‘Four-Party’ (1969), the latter directed by the American director George Cukor. Called again by Lelouch to interpret ‘Living to live’ (1967), ‘Who knows if I would still do it’ (1976) and ‘A man, a woman today’ (1987), she returned to Italian cinema after a long absence in 1980 with ‘ Leap into the void’ by Marco Bellocchio, thanks to which he won the Prix d’interpretation feminine at the Cannes Film Festival, and with ‘The tragedy of a ridiculous man’ (1981) by Bernardo Bertolucci.
In 1994 she played the role of a stylist in Robert Altman’s ‘Pret-a’-Porter’, a film about the world of fashion. In 2003 she was awarded the Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2019 she was again directed by Lelouch in ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’, the third episode after the great success of ‘A Man, a Woman’ (1966), and after ‘A Man, a Woman Today’ (1986), again on the side of Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Anouk Aimée has been married three times. She worked with the Greek director Nico Papatakis at the age of 19, then with the musician Pierre Barouh, whom she met on the set of ‘A Man, a Woman’, for whom she wrote and performed the famous refrain “dabadabada dabadabada”, and with the English actor Albert Finney. She lived with Elie Chouraqui, she had a relationship with Omar Sharif, her partner in Le Rendez-Vous – so many pages of her life that she always kept under a veil of mystery, even if she didn’t is never forbidden to talk about it.
