Anna Karina
Actress and leading figure of the French New Wave who was muse to her husband, Jean-luc Godard
ANNA KARINA, who has died of cancer aged 79, was an actress, writer, singer, director and, most famously, muse and first wife of the French New Wave film director Jean-luc Godard. Luminously beautiful and waif-like, with huge, doll-like eyes and expressive features, Anna Karina provided a counterpoint to Godard’s tendency to wordplay and preachiness and brought a lightness, tenderness and innocence to her husband’s films that he never found again after their tempestuous four-year marriage ended in 1965.
Much more than just a pretty face, Anna Karina was never associated with a particular cinematic image, unlike actresses such as Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe. A supremely intelligent performer who made acting look easy, she could be anything or anyone, but was never anything other than beguiling.
She made eight films with Godard – and was an unseen presence in Le Mépris (“Contempt”, 1963), in which the central relationship reflected the state of the Godards’ troubled marriage, with Brigitte Bardot playing the wife.
As an exotic burlesque dancer in Une Femme Est une Femme (“A Woman is a Woman”, 1961), Godard’s tribute to the Hollywood musical, Anna Karina was light and delightful, dancing round a pool table like “Cyd Charisse done by your girlfriend”, according to one critic. She picked up the Best Actress Award for the role at the Berlin Film Festival in 1961.
In Godard’s influential Vivre sa Vie (“My Life to Live”, 1962), in which the director adopted the cinéma vérité documentary approach to camerawork, she was intensely moving as Nana, a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties who leaves her husband and child hoping to become an actress, but ends up forced into prostitution.
By contrast, as the gauche, gamine Odile in Godard’s absurdist action movie Bande à Part (“Band of Outsiders”, 1964) she delighted in a lightly choreographed coffee-house dance scene tapping her feet alongside her fellow petty criminals, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur.
Then in the director’s futuristic noir Alphaville (1965), she was the computer programmer Natacha von Braun, a cold creature of the state who discovers the human qualities of compassion and love.
The same year, in the dark romantic comedy Pierrot Le Fou (“Pierrot the Madman”, 1965), she and Jean-paul Belmondo played runaways who go on a travelling crime spree, during which Anna Karina, as the capricious Marianne, clad in a succession of pink cotton dresses, sings as she slays five men.
After the end of her marriage to Godard, she was the lover of Michael Caine’s expatriate Englishman in The Magus (1968) and the girl who captivates Nicol Williamson’s middle-aged man in Laughter in the Dark (1969).
She starred in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette and Luchino Visconti’s The Stranger (both 1976) and put in a heartrending performance in Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse as a rebellious novice nun.
But it was for the films she made with her first husband that she will be remembered.
She was born Hanne Blarke Bayer on September 22 1940 in Denmark, later changing her name to the more cinematic Anna Karina at the suggestion of Coco Chanel.
Her parents separated a year after she was born and her mother remarried, but her stepfather was abusive and her mother ran up debts. As a result she spent several years in foster care.
She left school at 14 and ran away from home at the age of 17, hitchhiking to Paris, where she lived for a time in a cheap hotel while eking out a meagre living as a pavement artist.
After a scout for a modelling agency spotted her in Café Les Deux Magots she was taken up by Coco Chanel, featured on the front cover of Elle, and began appearing in commercials for everything from Coca-cola and Palmolive soap to Pepsodent.
Charmed by her performance in a series of Palmolive ads, soaping herself in the bath, Jean-luc Godard sent her a telegram inviting her to play a small role in his forthcoming film À bout de souffle (“Breathless”, 1960). But she turned him down after learning that she would have to take her clothes off.
Three months later she got another telegram from the director, offering her a lead role in this forthcoming film Le Petit Soldat (“The Little Soldier”, released in 1963, but made in 1960). As she was too young to sign a contract, Godard had to arrange for her estranged mother to go over to Paris from Denmark to give her approval.
In the film, which examined the dubious methods employed by the French during the Algerian war, Anna Karina was elusive as Veronica, a model and proalgerian activist who entrances Bruno, a French photographer doing “black ops” in Geneva.
During filming in Switzerland, Anna Karina and Godard began an affair, leading to a messy break-up with her then boyfriend, a painter. “I couldn’t help it,” she recalled. “Totally hypnotised. It was like a coup de foudre.” They married in 1961; she was pregnant at the time, but lost the baby.
In the early 1960s Anna Karina and Godard were Paris’s golden couple, but the domestic reality was very different from the glamorous image.
“I could never understand his behaviour,” she recalled. “He would say he was going out for cigarettes and then come back three weeks later. And at that time, as a woman, you didn’t have any chequebooks, you didn’t have any money … And I was sitting around the apartment without any food.”
By the time their last film together, Made in USA, was released in 1966, the marriage was over.
Later, as well as working with other directors, Anna Karina collaborated with Serge Gainsbourg on the pop hits Roller Girl and Sous le Soleil Exactement (both 1967), published four novels and wrote, directed and produced the film Vivre Ensemble (1972), a lightweight comedy that was panned by the critics.
Her final role was in the 2008 musical Victoria, which she wrote and directed.
Anna Karina lived in the Saint-germain-des-prés district of Paris. After her divorce from Godard she married the actors Pierre Fabre and Daniel Duval. Both marriages ended in divorce and in 1982 she married the American film director Dennis Berry. They divorced in 1994 but rekindled their relationship, and he was with her when she died.