Anouk Aimée, the Radiant French Star of ‘A Man and a Woman’ and ‘La Dolce Vita,’ Dies at 92 

French actress Anouk Aimée poses upon arriving at the Festival Palace to attend the premiere of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's film "El Laberinto del Fauno" (Pan's Labyrinth) at the 59th edition of the International Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 27, 2006. (AFP)
French actress Anouk Aimée poses upon arriving at the Festival Palace to attend the premiere of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's film "El Laberinto del Fauno" (Pan's Labyrinth) at the 59th edition of the International Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 27, 2006. (AFP)
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Anouk Aimée, the Radiant French Star of ‘A Man and a Woman’ and ‘La Dolce Vita,’ Dies at 92 

French actress Anouk Aimée poses upon arriving at the Festival Palace to attend the premiere of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's film "El Laberinto del Fauno" (Pan's Labyrinth) at the 59th edition of the International Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 27, 2006. (AFP)
French actress Anouk Aimée poses upon arriving at the Festival Palace to attend the premiere of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's film "El Laberinto del Fauno" (Pan's Labyrinth) at the 59th edition of the International Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 27, 2006. (AFP)

Anouk Aimée, the radiant French star and dark-eyed beauty of classic films including Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” and Claude Lelouch’s “A Man and a Woman,” has died. She was 92.

Aimée’s agent, Sébastien Perrolat said in a text message to The Associated Press that Aimée died Tuesday morning “surrounded by her loved ones.” He did not give a cause of death.

“I was beside her when she died this morning, at her home in Paris,” Aimée’s daughter Manuela Papatakis wrote on Instagram.

Aimée worked with an array of acclaimed directors, including Jacques Demy, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jacques Becker, Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet. She was perhaps best known for 1966’s “A Man and a Woman,” in which she starred opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant as a widow who meets a widower race-car driver (Trintignant) at the boarding school where each has a child attending.

The film was an enormous success, winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Aimée won a Golden Globe for her performance and was nominated for an Oscar. The film won Academy Awards for Lelouch’s screenplay and for best foreign language film.

But Aimée’s career spanned seven decades — she reunited with Lelouch and Trintignant for 2019’s “The Best Years of a Life” — and across that time remained a uniquely elegant and enigmatic presence. She starred in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) as the seductive socialite Maddalena and again in the director’s “8 1/2” (1963) as the estranged wife of Marcello Mastroianni’s filmmaker.

Fellini once said Aimée “represents the type of woman who leaves you flustered and confused — to death.” He said she belonged among the pantheon of cinema’s “great, mysterious queens,” comparing her to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford.

“A film is always much richer when actors have the confidence not to explain, but just to do; when they feel secure enough to leave things open,” Aimée told The Guardian in 2007.

Aimée was born Nicole Françoise Florence Dreyfus on April 27, 1932, to actor parents Henri Dreyfus (who acted under the name Henry Murray) and Genevieve Sorya. At the age of 13, Aimée was walking down a Paris street when the director Henri Calef stopped her and asked if she would like to be in a movie. Aimée later said she was on the way to see “Double Indemnity” with her mother.

Aimée took her character’s name, Anouk, from her first film: “The House Under the Sea.” “Aimée” — the French word meaning “loved” — came from the poet Jacques Prévert who co-wrote her first lead role in 1951’s “The Lovers of Verona,” a modern-day “Romeo and Juliet.”

Following “La Dolce Vita,” Aimée starred in Jacques Demy’s “Lola” (1961) a New Wave soap opera about a cabaret entertainer with a string of lovers. “Lola,” Demy’s first film, was less appreciated at the time but is now considered a standout of French New Wave cinema. Eight years later, Aimée reprised the role in the Los Angeles-set “Model Shop,” playing a woman working in a photo studio.

Aimée married and divorced four times. The first three marriages — to Edouad Zimmermann, the filmmaker Nikos Papatakis, the actor and composer Pierre Barouh — didn’t last four years. Her longest was to the British actor Albert Finney, whom she was married to from 1970 to 1978.

Though Aimée had brushes with Hollywood, including Lumet’s “The Appointment” and Altman’s “Prêt-à-Porter,” she remained largely a European film actor. Among the roles she turned down was Vicki Anderson in “The Thomas Crown Affair,” the role that eventually went to Faye Dunaway who starred opposite Steve McQueen.

But Aimée remained a legend in France. She won best actress in Cannes for the 1980 dark comedy “A Leap in the Dark.” In 2002, she was given a lifetime achievement award at the Césars, France’s equivalent to the Oscars. On Tuesday, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, in a statement, called her “the symbol of elegance, talent, commitment.”

“The secret — it was Fellini who taught me this — is that the most important thing of all is to listen,” Aimée told The Guardian of acting. “Just listen, to what the other characters say. And don’t take it too seriously. So, no regrets.”



Movie Review: 'Eddington' Is a Satire About Our Broken Brains That Might Re-Break Your Brain

 This image released by A24 shows Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in a scene from "Eddington." (A24 via AP)
This image released by A24 shows Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in a scene from "Eddington." (A24 via AP)
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Movie Review: 'Eddington' Is a Satire About Our Broken Brains That Might Re-Break Your Brain

 This image released by A24 shows Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in a scene from "Eddington." (A24 via AP)
This image released by A24 shows Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in a scene from "Eddington." (A24 via AP)

You might need to lie down for a bit after "Eddington." Preferably in a dark room with no screens and no talking. "Eddington," Ari Aster's latest nightmare vision, is sure to divide but there is one thing I think everyone will be able to agree on: It is an experience that will leave you asking "WHAT?" The movie opens on the aggravated ramblings of an unhoused man and doesn't get much more coherent from there. Approach with caution.

We talk a lot about movies as an escape from the stresses of the world. "Eddington," in which a small, fictional town in New Mexico becomes a microcosm of life in the misinformation age, and more specifically during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, is very much the opposite of that. It is an anti-escapist symphony of masking debates, conspiracy theories, YouTube prophets, TikTok trends and third-rail topics in which no side is spared. Most everyone looks insane and ridiculous by the end, from the white teenage girl (Amélie Hoeferle) telling a Black cop (Michael Ward) to join the movement, to the grammatical errors of the truthers, as the town spirals into chaos and gruesome violence.

Joaquin Phoenix plays the town sheriff, a soft-spoken wife guy named Joe Cross, who we meet out in the desert one night watching YouTube videos about how to convince your wife to have a baby. He's interrupted by cops from the neighboring town, who demand he put on a mask since he's technically crossed the border.

It is May 2020, and everyone is a little on edge. Joe, frustrated by the hysterical commitment to mandates from nowhere, finds himself the unofficial spokesperson for the right to go unmasked. He pits himself against the slick local mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is up for reelection, in the pocket of big tech and ready to exploit his single fatherhood for political gain. At home, Joe's mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell) spends all day consuming internet conspiracy theories, while his wife Louise (a criminally underused Emma Stone) works on crafts and nurses unspoken traumas.

Joe's eagerness to take on Ted isn't just about masking. Years ago, Ted dated his now-wife, a story that will be twisted into rape and grooming accusations. Caricatures and stereotypes are everywhere in "Eddington," but in this world it feels like the women are especially underwritten - they are kooks, victims, zealots and the ones who push fragile men to the brink. But in "Eddington," all the conspiracies are real and ordinary people are all susceptible to the madness.

In fact, insanity is just an inevitability no matter how well-intentioned one starts out, whether that's the woke-curious teen rattled by rejection, or the loyal deputy Guy (Luke Grimes) who is suddenly more than happy to accuse a colleague of murder. Louise will also be swayed by a floppy-haired internet guru, a cult-like leader played with perfect swagger by Austin Butler.

The problem with an anarchic satire like "Eddington," in theaters Friday, is that any criticism could easily be dismissed with a "that's the point" counterargument. And yet there is very little to be learned in this silo of provocations that, like all Aster movies, escalates until the movie is over.

There are moments of humor and wit, too, as well as expertly built tension and release. "Eddington" is not incompetently done or unwatchable (the cast and the director kind of guarantee that); it just doesn't feel a whole of anything other than a cinematic expression of broken brains.

Five years after we just went through (at least a lot of) this, "Eddington" somehow seems both too late and too soon, especially when it offers so little wisdom or insight beyond a vision of hopelessness. I wonder what world Aster thought he'd be releasing this film into. Maybe one that was better, not cosmically worse.

It's possible "Eddington" will age well. Perhaps it's the kind of movie that future Gen Alpha cinephiles will point to as being ahead of its time, a work that was woefully misunderstood by head-in-the-sand critics who didn't see that it was 2025's answer to the prescient paranoia cinema of the 1970s.

Not to sound like the studio boss in "Sullivan's Travels," trying to get the filmmaker with big issues on the mind to make a dumb comedy, but right now, "Eddington" feels like the last thing any of us need.