R.I.P. Anna Karina (1940-2019)

Anna Karina has passed away. Read the New York Times obit HERE. Many other obituaries and memorials have appeared in publications around the world.

Karina was a Danish-French film actress, director, writer, and singer who rose to prominence as French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard's muse in the 1960s, performing in several of his films, including The Little Soldier (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961), Vivre sa vie (1962), Band of Outsiders (1964), and Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville (both 1965). For her performance in A Woman Is a Woman, Karina won the Silver Bear Award for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival.

In addition to her work in cinema, she has worked as a singer, and has written several novels in French. Karina is widely considered an icon of 1960s cinema. The New York Times has described her as "one of the screen's great beauties and an enduring symbol of the French New Wave."

In his 1989 biography of Louise Brooks, Barry Paris wrote of the new wave obsession with our Lulu, adding "Jean-Luc Godard paid tribute through his actress wife Anna Karina, whose impulsive character in Une Femme est une Femme (1961) and again in Vivre sa Vie the next year was modeled on Louise."

Anna Karina was indeed, is indeed, a luminous presence, and like Brooks, a magnetism of the screen.

Here is the classic scene where Anna Karina dances to Michel Legrand's big band number 'Swing! Swing! Swing!' in Godard's Vivre Sa Vie (1962).

And here is the music video for "Dance With Me" by the French pop group Nouvelle Vague, which includes video clips from G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), starring Brooks, and Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à part (1964), starring Karina.