Anouk Aimée's stage surname was a gift from the poet Jacques Prévert
Born Françoise Dreyfus, she took her first name from a role she played at 14, and the screenwriter Jacques Prévert suggested the surname Aimée, French for beloved. Over seven decades and 70 films, from Fellini's La dolce vita to A Man and a Woman, she lived up to both.
She was born in Paris on 27 April 1932 to two performers, the actor Henry Murray and the actress Geneviève Sorya. Her father was Jewish and her mother Catholic; raised Catholic, she converted to Judaism as an adult. Speculation that the family was connected to Captain Alfred Dreyfus has never been confirmed. Her schooling moved around France, included dance at the Marseille Opera, and took her during the Second World War to Mayfield School in East Sussex, which she left before sitting her final exams.
Her screen debut, as a girl called Anouk in La Maison sous la mer, gave her the name she kept for life. Prévert wrote The Lovers of Verona (1949) with her in mind. International fame arrived with Fellini: after La dolce vita in 1960 one biographer called her a rising star who had exploded onto cinema, and a teenage Patti Smith dreamed of becoming an actress like her. She stayed in Italy for much of the early 1960s and returned to Fellini for 8½.
Her biggest success was Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman (1966), opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant. It took the Cannes Grand Prize and two Oscars, and her performance won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA and made her one of the relatively few actors nominated for an Academy Award for work outside English. Critics saw her as inventing a new sort of femme fatale, guarded before giving way to love. In 1980 she was named best actress at Cannes for Marco Bellocchio's A Leap in the Dark.
Four marriages, including to the actor Albert Finney from 1970 to 1978, all ended in divorce; her one child, Manuela, became a painter. France gave her an honorary César in 2002, and Berlin an honorary Golden Bear the next year. Her last film reunited her with Lelouch and Trintignant in The Best Years of a Life (2019). She died at home in Paris on 18 June 2024, aged 92.
Source: Anouk Aimée
