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.”



‘The Osbournes’ Changed Ozzy’s Image from Grisly to Cuddly, and Changed Reality TV 

Metal-rock star Ozzy Osbourne holds a replica of his new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as he poses with his family during a ceremony on April 12, 2002, in Los Angeles. Pictured with Osbourne, from left, are Aimee, Sharon, Kelly, Jack and Louis. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)
Metal-rock star Ozzy Osbourne holds a replica of his new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as he poses with his family during a ceremony on April 12, 2002, in Los Angeles. Pictured with Osbourne, from left, are Aimee, Sharon, Kelly, Jack and Louis. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)
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‘The Osbournes’ Changed Ozzy’s Image from Grisly to Cuddly, and Changed Reality TV 

Metal-rock star Ozzy Osbourne holds a replica of his new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as he poses with his family during a ceremony on April 12, 2002, in Los Angeles. Pictured with Osbourne, from left, are Aimee, Sharon, Kelly, Jack and Louis. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)
Metal-rock star Ozzy Osbourne holds a replica of his new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as he poses with his family during a ceremony on April 12, 2002, in Los Angeles. Pictured with Osbourne, from left, are Aimee, Sharon, Kelly, Jack and Louis. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)

There was Ozzy before "The Osbournes" and Ozzy after "The Osbournes."

For much of his life, the Black Sabbath founder and legendary heavy metal frontman who died at 76 on Tuesday was known to much of the public as a dark purveyor of deeds.

Wild stories followed him. Clergy condemned him. Parents sued him.

But with the debut of his family reality show on MTV, the world learned what those who'd been paying closer attention already knew: Ozzy Osbourne was soft and fuzzy under the darkness.

During its relatively short run from 2002 to 2005, "The Osbournes" became a runaway hit and made stars of his wife Sharon and kids Jack and Kelly. But more than that, it made a star of the domesticated version of Ozzy Osbourne, and in the process changed reality TV.

In 2025, when virtually every variety of celebrity has had a reality show, it's hard to see what a novelty the series was. MTV sold it as television's first "reality sitcom."

"Just the idea of the Black Sabbath founder, who will forever be known for biting the head off a bat during a 1982 concert, as a family man seems strange," Associated Press Media Writer David Bauder wrote on the eve of "The Osbournes" premiere. But on the show, Osbourne was "sweetly funny — and under everything a lot like the put-upon dads you’ve been seeing in television sitcoms for generations."

Danny Deraney, a publicist who worked with Osbourne and was a lifelong fan, said of the show, "You saw some guy who was curious. You saw some guy who was being funny. You just saw pretty much the real thing."

"He’s not the guy that everyone associates with the ‘Prince of Darkness’ and all this craziness," Deraney said. "And people loved him. He became so affable to so many people because of that show. As metal fans, we knew it. We knew that’s who he was. But now everyone knew."

Reality shows at the time, especially the popular competition shows like "Survivor," thrived on heightened circumstances. For "The Osbournes," no stakes were too low.

They sat on the couch. They ate dinner. The now-sober Ozzy sipped Diet Cokes, and urged his kids not to indulge in alcohol or drugs when they went out. He struggled to find the History Channel on his satellite TV. They feuded with the neighbors because, of all things, their loud music was driving the Osbournes crazy.

"You were seeing this really fascinating, appealing, bizarre tension between the public persona of a celebrity and their mundane experiences at home," said Kathryn VanArendonk, a critic for Vulture and New York Magazine.

The sitcom tone was apparent from its first moments.

"You turn on this show and you get this like little jazzy cover theme song of the song ‘Crazy Train,’ and there’s all these bright colors and fancy editing, and we just got to see this like totally 180-degree different side of Ozzy which was just surprising and incredible to watch," said Nick Caruso, staff editor at TVLine.

Like family sitcoms, the affection its leads clearly had for each other was essential to its appeal.

"For some reason, we kind of just fell in love with them the same way that we grew to love Ozzy and Sharon as like a marital unit," Caruso said.

What was maybe strangest about the show was how not-strange it felt. The two Ozzies seemed seamless rather than contradictory.

"You’re realizing that these things are personas and that all personas are these like elaborate complex mosaics of like who a person is," VanArendonk said.

"The Osbournes" had both an immediate and a long-term affect on the genre.

Both Caruso and VanArendonk said shows like "Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica," which followed then-pop stars Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey after they married, was clearly a descendant.

And countless other shows felt its influence, from "The Kardashians" to "The Baldwins" — the recently debuted reality series on Alec Baldwin, his wife Hilaria and their seven kids.

"'The Baldwins’ as a reality show is explicitly modeled on ‘The Osbournes,’ VanArendonk said. "It’s like you have these famous people and now you get to see what their home lives are like, what they are like as parents, what they’re eating, what they are taking on with them on vacation, who their pets are, and they are these sort of cuddly, warm, eccentric figures."