Federico Fellini said she belonged among the pantheon of cinema’s “great, mysterious queens,“ comparing her to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford.
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 an 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.
