Anna Karina

Copenhagen to Paris

She was born Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer on 22 September 1940 in Frederiksberg, on the edge of Copenhagen. Her childhood was unsettled — a father who left early, years spent largely with her grandparents — and she was drawn to acting and singing before she was out of her teens. In the summer of 1958, at seventeen and with almost no French, she left for Paris.[1]

She found modeling and magazine work quickly. The name came from one of those jobs: during a shoot connected to Coco Chanel, the couturier told her to call herself Anna Karina, after Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Advertising put her on screen before any film did — commercials, including a soap spot, that circulated in Paris in the late 1950s.

Meeting Godard

Godard noticed her in the advertisements and offered her a small part in Breathless. She turned it down because it required a nude scene. He cast her instead in Le Petit Soldat, shot in 1960 — a film about the Algerian War that French censors banned until 1963, so that her first Godard performance reached audiences third rather than first. They married in 1961.

The Godard films

Between 1960 and 1966 Karina appeared in seven Godard features, and Une femme est une femme won her the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival. The run:[2]

• Le Petit Soldat (1960; released 1963)
• Une femme est une femme (1961) — Silver Bear, Berlin
• Vivre sa vie (1962)
• Bande à part (1964)
• Alphaville (1965)
• Pierrot le fou (1965)
• Made in U.S.A. (1966)

The roles ranged widely — a nightclub dancer set on having a child, a prostitute in twelve tableaux, a member of a small-time gang, a fugitive lover, the heroine of a computer-run dystopia — and the films are among the most-taught the movement produced. Vivre sa vie holds the collaboration's most quoted image: Nana in a cinema, in the bob of the silent star Louise Brooks, weeping at Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc.

The marriage and the working partnership were not the same thing, and neither was calm. They divorced in 1965 and completed Made in U.S.A. after the divorce. Karina spoke for the rest of her life about how much of herself those films held, and about a director who wrote her parts and photographed her more closely than anyone before or since.

After Godard

The career outlasted the collaboration by half a century. She had first played Suzanne Simonin on stage, in 1963 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées; she worked for Jacques Rivette on film in La Religieuse (1966), for Luchino Visconti in The Stranger (1967), and later for Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Chinese Roulette (1976). In 1967 Serge Gainsbourg wrote her a television musical, Anna, whose songs — “Sous le soleil exactement” among them — outlived the broadcast.[3]

She moved behind the camera as well, directing two features — Vivre ensemble (1973), which showed at Cannes, and Victoria (2008) — and publishing four novels between 1973 and 1998. She married three more times after Godard, last to the American actor and director Dennis Berry, to whom she was married from 1982 until her death.

Paris, 2019

Anna Karina died of cancer in Paris on 14 December 2019, at 79. She is buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery. The obituaries agreed on the shape of her career: an actor the New Wave discovered and never replaced, whose performances for Godard remain the movement's most recognizable female face.[4]

Anna Karina, illustrated

Scenes from Anna Karina's Paris — drawn illustrations, not photographs.

Anna, and singing with Gainsbourg

In January 1967 French television broadcast Anna, a musical made for the screen by Pierre Koralnik with songs by Serge Gainsbourg, in which Karina plays a graphic designer whom an advertising man is trying to find.

It was the first French television film shot in colour, though colour broadcasting did not begin in France until that October, so the audience in January saw it in black and white. Gainsbourg wrote the whole score for her, and the song that came out of it, Sous le soleil exactement, is among the best-known things either of them did. He recorded his own version two years later; hers came first.

The film disappeared for decades, never having been released in cinemas, and has been revived since as one of the strangest and most stylish things French television produced in the 1960s.

The other Karina

After she stopped working with Jean-Luc Godard in 1967, Anna Karina went on for another fifty years, as a singer, a novelist and a director as well as an actor.

She wrote four novels, in French, beginning with Vivre ensemble in 1973 — the same title as the film she directed that year and about the same material. She recorded albums, toured a stage musical of her own, and went on singing into her seventies.

She directed twice: Vivre ensemble in 1973, made on almost no money and shown at Cannes, and Victoria in 2008, a road film shot in Canada. Neither is much seen. She was consistent about why she moved between acting, singing, writing and directing. She had arrived in Paris as a teenager trained in none of them, and had learned each one on the job because somebody gave her the chance.