Anna
Karina – actress
Born
September 22, 1940; died December 14, 2019
Anna
Karina, who has died aged 79, will forever embody the free-spirited and
rebellious joie de vivre of the French nouvelle vague. As an actress, the
camera adored her, with her intelligence and playful demeanour running
alongside a look that embodied European chic. Her early films with Jean Luc
Godard especially saw her at the vanguard of new cinema. It would be wrong,
however, to relegate her as a mere muse. Karina has gone on record
acknowledging the Pygmalion-like relationship she had with Godard, a mercurial
spirit ten years older than her who she would go on to marry. Despite her
youth, however, she wouldn’t put up with any of his nonsense.
Godard
first spotted Karina in a Palmolive soap commercial, and asked her to do a nude
scene in Breathless. When Karina declined, he pointed to her appearance in the
ad, when she was immersed in a bath-tub, covered in soap bubbles. She had to
point out to him that she has actually wearing a bathing suit, but as the
bubbles were up to her neck, it only gave the illusion of nudity, which he had
bought into. Such was the pair’s differing relationship to real life and
fiction from the start. Onscreen, Karina seemed to go beyond the artifice of
acting to radiate an energy more natural and instinctive. Karina would go on to
define her own creativity, not just as an actress, but as a singer, director,
producer and the author of four novels.
Born
Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer in Solbjerg, a suburban town on the east coast of
Denmark, Karina was renamed by Coco Chanel after she met her while on a
modelling shoot in Paris. She had hitch-hiked to France aged seventeen
following a row with her mother, who ran a dress shop. After her father left
her a year after she was born, Karina lived with her maternal grand-parents for
three years, then in foster care for four years before eventually living with
her mother once more.
As a
child she tried to run away from home numerous times, and after dropping out of
school aged fourteen sang in cabaret and worked as a model. She appeared in a
short film screened at Cannes, perhaps sowing the seeds for her escape to Paris
three years later. Sleeping rough, Karina was spotted by the casting director
of an ad agency while sitting at fashionable Left Bank café, Les Deux Magots, a
well-known haunt of French intellectuals. It was while on a photo-shoot that
Chanel turned up. Karina was unaware of who Chanel was, but took her advice.
Within a couple of weeks Karina was on the cover of Elle magazine.
Karina
appeared in seven of Godard’s films, as a photographer in the Algerian War set
Le Petit Soldat, filmed in 1961 but held up by censorship until 1963, through
to playing a left wing writer in Made in U.S.A. (1966). Many of the scenes in
Godard’s films Karina appeared in became iconic. There was the café bar dance
sequence in Bande a Part (1964), the musical striptease in Une Femme est Une
Femme (1961), for which she won the Silver Bear Award for Best Actress at the
Berlin Film Festival. There was the
close up of her character crying as she watches The Passion of Joan of Arc in
Vivre Sa Vie (1962). She also played a woman on the run in Pierrot le Fou
(1965), and joined Eddie Constantine in the hard-boiled science-fiction noir of
Alphaville (1965).
Karina
and Godard married in 1961 after falling in love during the filming of Le Petit
Soldat. The wedding guest list was a who’s who of French cinema, and their
wedding photographs made the cover of Paris-Match beneath the headline, ‘The
New Wave Bride’. Karina and Godard were together for four tempestuous years,
until the film-maker’s errant ways eventually proved too unreliable to put up
with anymore.
Karina
went on to work with other auteurs, including Roger Vadim (La Ronde), Agnes
Varda (Cleo from 5 to 7), Jacques Rivette (The Nun), Luchino Visconti (The
Stranger), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Chinese Roulette) and Tony Richardson
(Laughter in the Dark). In all of these, Karina seemed to live in the moment.
This was the case whether wide-eyed and frippish or else steeped in wordlessly
intense melancholy.
In
1967, she scored a couple of pop hits with Sous le Soleil Exactement and Roller
Girl, both written for her by Serge Gainsbourg for the musical film, Anna. In 1972,
Karina set up her own production company to direct her first self-written film,
Vivre ensemble, in which she also starred. The film was screened at Cannes. She
didn’t direct again until 2008, when she she wrote and starred in Victoria. It would
be her last film.
Inbetween,
in her personal life, Karina remarried thrice, to actors Pierre Fabre
(1968-1974) and Daniel Duval (1978-1981), then in 1982 to film director Denis
Berry, who cast her in Last Song (1987) and Chloe (1996). Latterly, Karina made
a rare American appearance, in Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie (2002).
In
2016, she visited London to take part in the British Film Institute’s retrospective
of films by Godard, and a year later was named Chevalier of the Legion of
Honour. In interviews she played down her contribution to a body of work that
defined an age that was both more carefree and more serious.
“Things
have changed,” she told Filmmaker magazine. “But at the time, if you were a
woman, you didn’t really have a voice. If you were a woman it was just, ‘Be
beautiful and shut up.’”
Without
Karina’s presence lighting up the screen with such seemingly effortless ease,
however, that age wouldn’t have looked nearly so joyous and full of life.
The Herald, December 19th 2019
ends
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