Born as Hanne Karen Blarke Bayer (Solbjerg, Denmark, September 22, 1940 – Paris, December 14, 2019), Anna Karina lived with her grandparents until she was four, when she began to live in various foster homes. . At eight years old, she moved to her mother’s house, from which she would try to escape several times during her childhood. At the age of fifteen, she worked as a secretary in elevators in the city of Copenhagen. She began her career in her native country, where she performed as a singer in amateur cabarets, she also managed to work as an advertising model and as an actress. In fact, her first screen role was in ‘The Girl and the Shoes’, a promotional short film from Ib Schemedes.
At the age of 17, she moved to Paris alone, wanting to get away from her native country due to the instability of her family life and her desire to pursue a career in France, a country she had visited in her early teens. She started with little money and it was during one of her visits to a legendary café in the Latin Quarter of Paris at the time, on the outskirts of the Rive Gauche of the Seine, where she was discovered. She got magazine jobs, most notably ‘Jours de France’ and ‘Elle’. She was an advertising model and in prestigious fashion houses such as Chanel, thanks to her magnetic and photographic beauty. The stage name by which she is known to this day was suggested by Coco Chanel herself, when young Hanne was parading for this fashion house. Madame Chanel approached her one day to ask if it was true that she wanted to be an actress. Not knowing who she was talking to, she said that she was; Gabrielle Coco Chanel asked her, “What’s your name?” Upon hearing her response, Coco Chanel suggested the stage name Anna Karina, which the young woman considered great and she adopted from then on.
Her first film appearance, albeit an unauthorized one, was in ‘On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time’, directed by Guy Debord, which featured an ad Anna made for a brand of soap. The image was accompanied by Debord’s voice saying: “Announcements during interruptions – in a movie – are the true reflection of an interruption in life.”
In 1959, she met Jean-Luc Godard, who, after seeing her image in the aforementioned advertisement, offered her to play an important character in his first film ‘At the end of the getaway’, a role that she turned down because it included nude scenes. Faced with his refusal, Godard decided to do without this character in his film. This did not stop Anna from accepting the leading role in the director’s next film, ‘The Little Soldier’. At the time, she Anna was a minor and could not work without the permission of her mother, whom Godard flew in from Copenhagen for the signing. The film was censored in France because it depicted torture on both sides during the Algerian War of Independence. In 1961 they got married during the filming of their second joint film, entitled ‘A woman is a woman’. Her performance in this film earned her the best actress award at the Berlin Festival.
Anna was the muse of many of the director’s subsequent projects, which became the most remembered in their careers, including titles such as ‘Live your life’, ‘Band apart’, ‘Pierrot the crazy’, ‘Lemmy against Alphaville ‘ and ‘Made in the USA’. Her collaborations with Godard ended shortly before her marriage, in 1967. However, her career was not limited to Godard’s films alone, neither during her marriage nor after her. For ‘La religiosa’, by another Nouvelle vague filmmaker, Jacques Rivette, she won the Cannes Film Festival award, an interpretation considered the best of her career. She worked with Luchino Visconti in ‘The Stranger’, in George Cukor’s ‘Justine’, and with directors such as Tony Richardson, Ingmar Bergman or Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
In the 1980s, she made her debut as a director (she directed two films with an interval of 35 years between them) and as a novelist, adapting to experimental cinema, television and musicals, recording records and creating her own production company. The actress and singer she died at her Parisian home on December 14, 2019, at the age of 79. Anna Karina went beyond the cinema to become a timeless icon, whose image is still imitated today by thousands of European women who have wanted to move, dress or comb their hair in a purely ‘Karinian’ way.
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