Actress Anouk Aimée, famous for her role in the 1966 film “Un homme et une femme”, has died at the age of 92, her daughter Manuela Papatakis announced on social networks

“My daughter Galaad, my granddaughter Mila, and I are deeply saddened to announce the death of my mother Anouk Aimée,” she posted on Instagram. “I was at her side when she passed away this morning at her home in Paris.”

The Garde des Sceaux Éric Dupond-Moretti paid tribute to the actress, writing, “Anouk Aimée has left us. My thoughts are with her family and Claude. She made us dream so much, chabadabada…”.

Julien Duvivier, Federico Fellini, Claude Lelouch, Jacques Demy, Sydney Lumet, George Cukor, André Cayatte… Anouk Aimée has acted under the direction of some of the greatest filmmakers of her time.

Born in 1932 in Paris under the name Françoise Dreyfus, she adopted the name Anouk Aimée at the age of 14. She began her film career in the 1940s. Anouk was the first name of her first character in the film “La Maison sous la mer”. Jacques Prévert gave her her stage name, Aimée. “When you’re barely 15 and Jacques Prévert gives you a name, you keep it, even if it wasn’t Aimée,” she told France Culture in 2014. Her career took off in the 1960s with the New Wave.

Anouk Aimée starred in Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” and “Huit et demi”, Jacques Demy’s “Lola” and, above all, Claude Lelouch’s “Un homme et une femme”, with Jean-Louis Trintignant, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and earned her an Oscar nomination.

In 1968, she returned to Jacques Demy for “Model Shop”, in which he wanted to cast a young American actor named… Harrison Ford. “When I arrived in Los Angeles, (Jacques Demy) said to me ‘I’ve found a wonderful young guy, you’ve got to help me because they don’t want him’. And it was Harrison Ford, and they (the producers) didn’t want him”, she recounted in 2002.

César d’honneur “I haven’t made a career, I don’t feel like that at all”, she declared in 2002, when Claude Lelouch presented her with a César d’honneur for her entire career.

“I never thought about my career, I let things come to me”, she confided again in 2014 on France Culture.

With Claude Lelouch, she also made “Et si c’était à refaire” in 1976, then “Un homme et une femme : vingt ans déjà” in 1986, a sequel to the first film, again with Trintignant. She also appeared in “Hommes, femmes : mode d’emploi” in 1996, “Une pour toutes” in 1999, “Ces amours-là” in 2010, and “Les plus belles années d’une vie” in 2019, where she reprised her role as Anne Gauthier, the heroine of “Un homme et une femme”. This will be her last film appearance.

Anouk Aimée also made several forays into American cinema, filming for Sydney Lumet (Le Rendez-vous) and George Cukor (Justine) in 1969. In addition to Fellini, she worked with a number of Italian directors including Dino Risi (Le Succès), Alessandro Blasetti (Le Coq du village), Sergio Corbucci (Le Jour le plus court) and Florestano Vancini (Les Saisons de notre amour).