The superbly aquiline beauty and patrician style of Anouk Aimée made her a 60s movie icon in France, Italy and everywhere else with a presence at once alluring and forbidding. She had something of the young Joan Crawford, or Marlene Dietrich, or her contemporary, the French model and actress Capucine. Aimée radiated an enigmatic sexual aura flavoured with melancholy, sophistication and worldly reserve. Hers was not a face that could simper or pout: it was the entranced men around her who were more likely to be doing that. Hirokazu Kore-eda once wrote an amusing line that all the great French movie actresses have surnames that begin with the same letter as their first names: Danielle Darrieux, Simone Signoret, Brigitte Bardot … and of course Anouk Aimée is absolutely in that brand-identity tradition – although this is a stage name (she was born Nicole Dreyfus) derived from the name of her first movie character and the resonant word “beloved”.
In Jacques Demy’s musicless musical Lola from 1961, Aimée played the title role: a cabaret singer (like Dietrich in The Blue Angel) who stuns men everywhere, but her unattainability is naturally essential to her desirability. In Demy’s later film Model Shop (1969), he revives the Lola character; she is now working at a sleazy “model shop” studio where men can take lurid photos. Other directors found in Aimée that same melodramatic “muse” quality that her air of untouchability perhaps encouraged: Jacques Becker’s 1958 film about Modigliani, Montparnasse 19 had Aimée as the painter’s lover and subject Jeanne Hébuterne.
