Pony hairstyle, pale complexion and big blue eyes: these trademarks made Anna Karina an icon of the Nouvelle Vague. The French film star has now died. This was reported on Sunday by the AFP news agency, citing Karina's agents. Accordingly, she succumbed to cancer in Paris on Saturday. Karina was 79 years old.
"Her gaze was that of the Nouvelle Vague. He will always be," said French Culture Minister Franck Riester Karina on Twitter. French cinema has lost one of its legends.
Karina was born on September 22, 1940 near Aarhus in Denmark as Hanne Karin Bayer. She lived temporarily with a foster family and worked as a mannequin as a teenager. When she was 17 she went to Paris, where she was a model for the fashion designers Coco Chanel and Pierre Cardin and posed for advertising.
In the 1960s she came to the theater and made several films with Jean-Luc Godard, which became classics of French cinema. Among them "A woman is a woman" and "Eleven o'clock at night" (original title: "Pierrot le fou"), in which she appears alongside Jean-Paul Belmondo. For her performance in "A Woman is a Woman" she was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlinale in 1961 as best actress.
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Anna Karina: "The look of the Nouvelle Vague"Godard discovered Karina in one of her commercials, in which she was covered in soap foam and sat in a bathtub. He then offered her a supporting role in his feature film "Out of Breath", which she declined because of a nude scene. When Godard replied that she was also naked in the Palmolive advertisement, Karina straightened his head, as she told in a "Vogue" interview in 2016. You said to him: "I wasn't naked at all - just in your imagination. There was only a little bit of my shoulder to see from the foam. And I was wearing a swimsuit!"
She then took on the role in Godard's second full-length film, "The Little Soldier". A year later, in March 1961, they both said yes. Karina made a total of seven films with Godard. These include the science fiction thriller "Lemmy Caution against Alpha 60" (original title: "Alphaville") and "Die Auserseiterbande" ("Bande à part"). In Agnès Varda's nouvelle vague classic "Cleo - Wednesday between 5 and 7", Karina and Godard have a joint short appearance: the two can be seen there as a pantomime in a silent film that the main character Cleo is delighted to see.
Second and third career paths
Her marriage lasted until 1965, after which Karina was married three more times, from 1982 until her death with the director Dennis Berry. In 2017 he dedicated her own documentary: "Anna Karina, souviens-toi" (Anna Karina, remember) premiered at the Lumière film festival in Lyon.
Karina also worked with other directors early on in her career. Jacques Rivette brought her in front of the camera with Liselotte Pulver for his film "The Nun", Luchino Visconti for "The Stranger" with Marcello Mastroianni, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder turned her "Chinese Roulette" with her.
In 1973 she finally directed for the first time: She also wrote the screenplay for the love drama "Vivre ensemble" and took on the female lead role. One last time she was seen in 2008 in her own directorial work "Victoria".
Karina was also known in France as a singer, first in 1967 through the musical "Anna", in which she sang songs by Serge Gainsbourg. Two songs on the record for the film, "Sous le Soleil exactement" and "Roller Girl", were hits in France. Between 1973 and 1998 four novels she wrote appeared.
Her last big appearance was in Cannes last year. There a film still from "Eleven at night" adorned the official poster with her and Belmondo. She was also a star guest at the famous festival at the opening.
