Anouk Aimée is perhaps best known for her remarkable presence as an icon of cool, sophisticated beauty in more than seventy films across seven decades, including such classics as Alexandre Astruc’s Le Rideau Cramoisi (The Crimson Curtain, 1952), Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), Jacques Demy’s Lola (1963), André Delvaux’s Un Soir, un Train (One Evening, One Train, 1968), George Cukor’s Justine (1969), Bernardo Bertolucci’s Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), Robert Altman’s Prêt à Porter (Ready to Wear, 1994) and, most unforgettably, Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman, 1966) opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant—a film that virtually reignited the lush on-screen romance in an era of skeptical modernism. Words like “regal,” “intelligent” and “enigmatic” are frequently associated with her, giving Aimée 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).Her striking features are known to many who have never seen her films. The much-vaunted comparison with Jacqueline Kennedy is more than physical; film historian Ginette Vincendeau notes that Aimée’s films “established her as an ethereal, sensitive and fragile beauty with a tendency to tragic destinies or restrained suffering.”

While little is known of her Jewish background, it is in one of her most recent roles as a Holocaust survivor returning to Auschwitz, in Marceline Loridan’s directorial debut (at age seventy-five), La Petite prairie aux bouleaux (The Little Meadow of Birch-Trees, 2002), that Anouk Aimée brilliantly dramatizes her identity as a Jewish woman. Herself only a young girl during the German occupation of France and the Vichy regime, each with its specific program of antisemitic persecution, Aimée is a perfect fit for Loridan’s autobiographical work. (Loridan was a fourteen-year-old inmate of Auschwitz). At the New York City screening of the film in the spring of 2003, Aimée was still reticent about her own life during the war (she referred to a relative who had been deported and killed but stopped short of saying what she herself experienced), yet she spoke with eloquence and animation about the importance of documenting this chapter of Jewish history.

Anouk Aimée was born Françoise Sorya on April 27, 1932 in Paris. Both her parents were actors; her mother, Geneviève Sorya, was not Jewish, but her father, Henry Dreyfus (who used the name Henry Murray professionally), was. There may be some connection to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, but this has never been elaborated. She was referred to variously as Françoise Sorya, Françoise Dreyfus or Nicole Dreyfus until her acting career (begun when she was just fourteen, with a role in Henri Calef’s La Maison sous la mer [The House by the Sea, 1947]) earned her the name by which she is known. At first she was simply Anouk, taken from the character she played in Marcel Carné’s unfinished film La Fleur de l’âge (The Flower of the Age); it was the poet Jacques Prévert, writing André Cayatte’s Les Amants de Vérone (The Lovers of Verona, 1949) specifically for her, who playfully added the symbolic last name that would forever associate her with the affective power of her screen roles.Already talented as a child, Aimée studied acting and ballet in Paris, London and Marseilles; her training in dance at the famous Bauer-Therond school prepared her for future roles as a performer in such films as Lola and The Model Shop (Demy, 1969).

Anouk Aimée has been making films all her life; during the 1980s and 1990s, when other actresses had difficulty finding roles for “mature” women, she made one film a year and she continues now into the twenty-first century. (“You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older,” she said in 1988.)

In 2003 she was awarded an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where she used the opportunity to step out of her role as star to advocate for peace “for the children of the world.” Even though she has been referred to as “ageless,” “a legend,” and “a goddess of cinema mythology,” quite possibly her role in The Little Meadow of Birch-Trees (based on the real-life experience of its maker, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, as a teenage prisoner in Birkenau), so close to her own experience as a Jewish woman who comes to terms with her wartime past, contributed to the way she sees herself now, as an icon of world peace and reconciliation rather than the enigmatic diva of the European art cinema.

Her career can be roughly divided into three phases—the early arthouse avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s in which she defined a new kind of modern heroine; the period of international stardom, initiated by the Academy Award nomination and Best Foreign Film award and the Golden Globe for Un Homme et une femme and marked by work with many of world cinema’s most talented directors; and the phase of the committed woman, still beautiful but less concerned with screen presence than with using her position and her fame to make a difference in the world. Her three marriages loosely correspond to these time periods; she was briefly married to director Nikos Papatakis (1951–1954), then to composer Pierre Barouh (Baruch) from 1966 to 1969 (who appeared with her when she received the Golden Globe for Un Homme et une femme), and finally to actor Albert Finney (1970–1978), when she seems to have semi-retired from acting for a while.

But it is as a single woman for the last twenty-five years that Aimée has solidified her reputation both as a major actress with international appeal and as a champion of human rights. She lives in the Montmartre section of Paris with her daughter Manuela, continuing to demonstrate her “distinctive combination of melancholy and passion” in films that match the intensity of her beauty with the complexity of mature roles..