Homage to Anna Karina & Michel Piccoli

French cinema has recently lost two of its iconic stars: Anna Karina and Michel Piccoli. In July, the DFF cinema is paying tribute to the work of the two actors, whose paths crossed early on in Jean Aurel’s episodic film DE L’AMOUR (All About Loving, 1964).

Anna Karina was born as Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer in Denmark in 1940. At the age of 17 she went to Paris and worked as a model for Coco Chanel among others, who gave her the stage name Anna Karina. She became the world-famous icon of the Nouvelle Vague because of her leading roles in the early movies of Jean-Luc Godard, whom she married in 1961. Among them the central work VIVRE SA VIE (1962).

After the separation from Godard in 1965 she acted under the direction of various famous directors, for example alongside Marcello Mastroianni in Luchino Visconti’s Camus film adaptation L’ÉTRANGER (The Stranger, 1967) or in CHINESISCHES ROULETTE (Chinese Roulette, 1976) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Anna Karina died of cancer on 14 December 2019 in Paris.

Michel Piccoli, born in Paris in 1925, was one of the most important and productive actors in France with appearances in more than 200 films. He was successful from the end of the 1940s, first on the Parisian stages before he became a busy supporting actor on the big screen from the mid-1950s. Just as with Anna Karina, for Piccoli it was Jean-Luc Godard who helped him to his big breakthrough at the beginning of the 1960s: with LE MÉPRIS (Contempt, 1963) in which he starred alongside Brigitte Bardot.

The immense range that Piccoli covered as a character actor in the following decades could be regularly admired in the DFF cinema in recent years – most recently, for example, in the films of Claude Sautet or Marco Ferreri. By contrast, Claude Faraldo’s anarchist satire THEMROC (1973), which became a cult film not least thanks to Piccoli’s powerful portrayal, and Jacques Rivette’s LA BELLE NOISEUSE (The Beautiful Troublemaker, 1991) about the complex interaction between art and life were not seen for a long time. Michel Piccoli died of a stroke on 12 May 2020 in Normandy.