Iconic French Actress Anouk Aimée Dead at 92

One of the biggest movie stars from France has left us.

Anouk Aimée, who first started acting in 1947, recently passed away.

She was 92 years old.

She’s Gone

Aimée’s daughter, Manuela Papatakis, confirmed her mother’s death on social media.

She posted, “With my daughter, Galaad, and my granddaughter, Mila, we have great sadness to announce the departure of my mother Anouk Aimée.

“I was right by her side when she passed away this morning at her home in Paris.”

The French actress has regularly been described as “regal,” “intelligent” and “enigmatic,” giving the actress, according to journalist Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “an aura of disturbing and mysterious beauty that has earned her the status of one of the hundred sexiest stars in film history (in a 1995 poll conducted by Empire magazine).”

Aimée broke through with an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in “A Man and a Woman,” something we rarely see in foreign-language films.

A review of the film stated that it was “a reminder that the sleekly produced modern Hollywood romance isn’t the only way to go, that romantic films can benefit from the raw aesthetics of the low-budget independent. Aimée and Trintignant are movie-star pretty, but Lelouch’s style gives them both a weighty humanity, as do their performances.

“Like any respectable disciple of the French New Wave, Lelouch gives his actors plenty of room to improvise, to get to the heart of a scene via whatever path feels natural. The tentative nature of the interactions between Aimée and Trintignant — their halting eye contact, pregnant pauses, nervous laughs — undercuts (in a good way) their sparkling good looks and movie-star mystique.”

That particular film won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and Foreign Language Film, but Aimée did not land the hardware for the 1966 film.

She did, however, have 13 other awards and five nominations during her very long and successful career.

From 1955 through 1969, not a single year passed without Aimée having at least one movie released.

After a brief lull in the 1970s, she picked it right back up in the early 1980s and continued to make movies through 2012, where she had a seven-year break before her final film, “The Best Years of a Life” in 2019.

Rest in peace.