She rose to fame before she had time to dream of fame.

At fourteen, in post-war Paris, she was on her way to the cinema with her mother when a director approached her on the street.

The man, his name was Henri Calef, gave her a small role in his next film.

Back then, her name was Nicole Dreyfus, the daughter of a Jewish couple of actors, but she liked her role name Anouk better.

Now all she needed was a last name.

Jacques Prévert, the poet, gave it to her on the set of a film by Marcel Carné, in which she acted that same year and which was never finished: Aimée, the beloved.

She then starred in her next film.

It was, of course, a love story, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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There is something fairytale about the beginnings of Anouk Aimée, an aura of mystery and enchantment that has never left her.

That was the only reason why she was able to play the harbor bar singer Lola in Jacques Demy (“Lola, the girl from the harbor”) with an innocence that mocked all her lace corsets and lascivious songs.

And that's why she chose Claude Lelouch to partner Jean-Louis Trintignant in A Man and a Woman, a film that is about nothing but a love affair between a secretary and a racing driver, but tells this story as if she were first love story in the world.

For her, Trintignant races in the car after the train that takes her from Deauville to Paris, and just because it's her, this cool, dark, chiseled beauty, you believe him.

Gave up trying to decipher her face

Fellini filmed the most beautiful scene with her.

In "La dolce vita" she is the rich heiress Maddalena, with whom Marcello Mastroianni drives to an abandoned villa whose walls are covered with oil paintings of goddesses and princesses.

Then she leaves him alone in a room called the Salon of Serious Conversations, speaking into a fountain bowl somewhere nearby, and her voice fills the room through which Mastroianni wanders like a confused moth in search of the light.

It is as if Fellini had found in Rome for Anouk Aimée the setting befitting her appearance, a timeless palace, a place of royal solitude.

Back in 1959, the Nouvelle Vague sun was just rising, and one would have expected the rebels of French cinema to make Anouk Aimée's face their icon.

But they evaded her, and Anouk Aimée went to Demy and Lelouch, the misfits, and remained loyal to them.

She has made eight films with Lelouch, including two sequels to A Man and a Woman, and in the last one, which came out two years ago, she celebrates her triumph over Trintignant, whose features have been weathered by the storms of the years while her face has lost only its youth, not its grace.

He's in a nursing home and she owns an antique shop, but it's really just about seeing the lovers one more time before night falls.

In the intervening decades, Anouk Aimée has played small roles in big films (Altman's Ready-to-Wear, Bertolucci's Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man) and larger roles in many small films.

But basically the cinema hasn't come much closer to her.

One might think it had given up trying to decipher her face.

And maybe Anouk Aimée wanted it that way.

Today she is ninety years old.