Anouk Aimée, enigmatic star of ‘A Man and a Woman,’ dies at 92

The daughter of actors, Ms. Aimée made her movie debut at 14 and remained — over seven decades and more than 80 films — a spellbinding, enigmatic presence on-screen.

“She’s a star quite simply because she is amazingly photogenic, amazingly provocative,” Fellini once said. “She belongs to the great masked pantheon of the cinema with this face that has the same intriguing sensuality as that of Garbo, Dietrich or Crawford, those great, mysterious queens, those high priestesses of femininity. Anouk Aimée represents the type of woman who leaves you flustered and confused — to death.”

Jacques Demy and Claude Lelouch were also among the directors drawn to her fine-boned aristocratic beauty and brown Modigliani eyes conveying suffering, carnality and a tantalizing indifference.

In “La Dolce Vita” (1960), she was a wealthy, bored, nymphomaniac socialite who seduces a gossip columnist (Marcello Mastroianni) and makes love to him in a prostitute’s apartment. She swans through the film in a black cocktail dress, upswept hair and dark sunglasses at night — a sybarite with masochistic tastes, her shades hiding a black eye that she might have invited.

Three years later, her chestnut hair largely shorn, Ms. Aimée reunited with Fellini for “8½ ,” playing the jealous and bitter wife of a movie director (Mastroianni) in the throes of artistic and personal crises. Widely regarded as Fellini’s autobiographical masterpiece, the film received the Oscar for best foreign-language film and burnished Ms. Aimée’s luster in the eyes of art-house devotees.

She played the title role in Demy’s first feature-length film, “Lola” (1961), portraying a ravishing but none-too-bright dancehall chanteuse who freely gives of her charms even as her pure heart remains true to the long-vanished first love who left her pregnant.

The film failed to find much of an audience, even in France, but the British film critic Dilys Powell showered Ms. Aimée with superlatives for her part, noting in her “exquisite performance a breathless, electric, vulnerable, supremely sensuous being.”

For all her talents, she seemed to accept roles indiscriminately, from a dull and dissatisfied beauty in the well-received French comedy “The Joker” (1960) to the debauched Queen of Sodom in the anemic biblical spectacle “Sodom and Gomorrah” (1962).

“Really I do not like working,” she explained to the Copley News Service in 1967, adding: “I have done bad films when I needed money to live well and be comfortable. … But if I am comfortable, I will not do a bad film to get more money.”

Lelouch was a little-known director when he charmed Ms. Aimée into making “A Man and a Woman” (1966), a low-budget feature for which no one — least of all the director and his star — had any commercial expectation.

The romantic drama was about two widowed parents, a film-set assistant (Ms. Aimée) and a racecar driver (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who conduct a nearly wordless affair against the backdrop of sunset strolls on the beach and encounters shot through mist-soaked windshields.

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The movie was a simple love story, told with deliriously swirling camerawork and an instantly canonized samba score by Francis Lai. It became a global hit, a cultural touchstone and the biggest commercial smash of the actress’s career.

Although critically derided as treacle, it won the grand prize at Cannes and the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. Ms. Aimée was nominated for the best actress Oscar but lost to Elizabeth Taylor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Nevertheless, “A Man and a Woman” set Ms. Aimée on a trajectory toward Hollywood stardom — one that she soon abandoned.

She asked her agent to get her out of the romantic thriller “The Thomas Crown Affair,” which became a box-office knockout with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, so she could make a fantasy-drama called “Un Soir, un Train” (1968) with André Delvaux, a Belgian filmmaker she admired. “I refused a big thing to do that” Belgian movie, she later told TV host Charlie Rose. “But I’m not sorry.”

Nicole Françoise Florence Dreyfus was born in Paris on April 27, 1932. Her father, Henry Murray (formerly Henri Dreyfus), was an actor and producer, and her mother, Geneviève Sorya, was an actress.

She studied dance at the Marseille Opera and excelled at horsemanship at a school in Sussex, England. She made her screen debut after director Henri Calef spotted her outside a movie theater and recruited her for a small role in the romantic melodrama “La maison sous la mer” (“The House Under the Sea,” 1947).

She adopted the name of her character in that movie, Anouk, and soon added Aimée (translated as “beloved”) at the suggestion of two early admirers, writer-director Marcel Carné and poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert.

Prévert wrote for her an early leading part in “The Lovers of Verona” (1949), about a tragic love affair that blossoms between two young people on a movie set (the other was Serge Reggiani) during a filming of “Romeo and Juliet.”

The film brought her wider attention and led to her co-starring role with Trevor Howard in a British crime drama, “The Golden Salamander” (1950). But her interest in acting waned after the birth of her daughter, Manuela Papatakis, in 1951.

Her marriages to industrialist Edouard Zimmermann, Paris nightclub owner and director Nico Papatakis, singer-songwriter Pierre Barouh and British actor Albert Finney ended in divorce. Her daughter, who had a modeling career, survives.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Ms. Aimée was in a variety of romances and dramatic potboilers before Fellini chose her for “La Dolce Vita,” seemingly on a whim, after seeing her picture in a magazine. She recalled the phone conversation: “He said, ‘You like the part? You do the part? Fine. Goodbye.’”

She described him as an inscrutable genius who gave little direction. “The first week was terrible,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I was scared. I didn’t understand anything. But he’s a magician.” She added, “For Fellini I would do anything. I even cut my eyelashes for him in ‘8½.’”

Her English-language career faltered in the late 1960s with three high-profile commercial failures: “The Appointment,” as a femme fatale opposite her off-screen lover Omar Sharif, “Justine” with Dirk Bogarde and Michael York, and “Model Shop,” for which Demy had Lola transplanted to Los Angeles.

After she wed Finney in 1970, she said she planned to quit acting. But she grew restless as the marriage started to sputter. Finney biographer Gabriel Hershman noted the actor’s womanizing and heavy drinking, as well as Ms. Aimée’s insecurities and possessiveness, as major factors in the decline of their relationship. She became the companion of actor Ryan O’Neal before emerging again as an actress, mostly in European cinema.

Ms. Aimée made several films with Lelouch (most notably “A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later,” 1986) and with Élie Chouraqui, who became her lover. She also worked with directors as varied as Bernardo Bertolucci (“Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man,” 1981), Robert Altman (“Ready to Wear,” 1994) and Henry Jaglom (“Festival in Cannes,” 2001).

She won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for the dark comedy “A Leap in the Dark” (1980), playing the unstable sister of a high-strung jurist (Michel Piccoli). In 2002, she was recognized for lifetime achievement with an honorary César, France’s highest film award.

Her chic sophistication made her a muse of fashion designer Emanuel Ungaro in the 1980s, and she was photographed by Herb Ritts in 1995 for a Donna Karan advertising campaign.

“The day you don’t seduce — nothing to do with bed or lovemaking, but enchantment — you’re dead,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. “I adore the camera, love it, we have a rapport. That’s where seduction comes in.”