From the beginning of film history, there have been examples of directors putting their wives and/or lovers in their films, such as Josef von Sternberg-Marlene Dietrich and Roberto Rossellini-Ingrid Bergman. But there was never anything like the goings-on between the directors and their stars during the period of the French New Wave in the 1960s.

Among the couples were Louis Malle-Jeanne Moreau, Claude Chabrol–Stéphane Audran, and François Truffaut with a number of his leading ladies. However, the closest cinematic and personal relationship was that of Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

In Godard’s films, the Danish-born Karina, who has died aged 79 of cancer, is seldom off screen, coquettish and spirited, and never a mere victim or innocent. Their films together have been described as documentaries of Karina herself.

She became an axiom of the Godardian cinema. In contrast, her career seemed barely to exist outside it, even though she starred in a variety of other well-known directors’ films. Her presence is nearly always compared to roles under Godard’s direction.

It was clear from the release in 1961 of A Woman Is a Woman (Une Femme Est une Femme), Godard’s widescreen, colour homage to MGM musicals of the 50s, that he was besotted with her, and they got married later that year.

Their relationship was a classic example of a male auteur constructing his personal universe, and constructing his wife’s persona to fit or perform within that universe. But as their series of collaborations progressed, their marriage gradually dissolved.

Their eighth and final collaboration, Pierrot le Fou, came in the year of their divorce, 1965. It was about the transience of a relationship (Jean-Paul Belmondo/Karina; Godard/Karina). It has been suggested that because Godard loved Karina more in moving images than in life it caused the marriage to break. But she confessed that Godard remained, out of her four marriages, the love of her life.

Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live, 1962) was a passionate celluloid love letter to Karina, her face in closeup being used to devastating effect, reminiscent of Louise Brooks, Lillian Gish and Falconetti. It tells the tale of the short life of Nana, a beautiful Parisian, in 12 brief scenes. In one, Karina is in a cinema tearfully watching Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. At another point she is a sex worker who dances seductively around a pool table to gain a client or two.

In Godard’s Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part, 1964), Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur do a spontaneous, synchronised dance in a cafe to which Quentin Tarantino paid homage in the disco duo in Pulp Fiction (1994).

She is suitably robotic in Alphaville (1965), Godard’s tribute to American pulp fiction. When questioned, she does not know the meaning of love or conscience, but the film ends with her uttering “Je vous aime,” to the American private eye Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine).

Pierrot le Fou saw the end of the love affair as the petty thieves Karina and Belmondo bicker in the south of France, at one stage entertaining American troops with a sketch on the war in Vietnam, with Karina playing a Vietnamese peasant.

A native of Solbjerg, a suburb of Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, she was born Hanne Karin Bayer. Her mother ran a dress shop; her father left shortly after she was born. She had an unhappy childhood, which was partly spent in foster care.

In 1958 she made her way to Paris after working as a model and singing and dancing in cabaret, a talent that Godard utilised in his films. They met when he was casting a supporting role in Breathless, his first film, having seen her in soap ads in the cinema. However, she refused when he mentioned there would be a nude scene.

After Godard, she had no qualms about the title role in The Nun (La Religieuse, 1966), Jacques Rivette’s sombre adaptation of an 18th-century novel by Denis Diderot, in which she has to endure semi-starvation, beatings and sexual harassment and abuse.

Having established herself as the darling of the French New Wave, she appeared to less effect in Luchino Visconti’s The Stranger (1967), based on Albert Camus; as a ravishing adolescent in Laughter in the Dark (1969), Tony Richardson’s adaptation of the Vladimir Nabokov novel, moved from its Berlin setting to swinging London; and Justine (also 1969), George Cukor’s failed attempt to compress Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet into one film.

Although she was as attractive as ever in these more conventional roles, Godard’s magic ability to light her from within was missing.

She recorded songs by Serge Gainsbourg including Sous le Soleil Exactement and Roller Girl on the album Anna (1967), and when she came to have fewer film roles of interest, she wrote four novels.

In 1973, she wrote, directed, produced and starred in Vivre Ensemble (Living Together), a dark, low-budget love story shot in New York. She was also the writer, director and star of a French-Canadian musical road movie, Victoria (2008).

Her second marriage was to the writer and actor Pierre Fabre, in 1968; they divorced in 1974. Four years later she married the actor and director Daniel Duval; they divorced in 1981. Her final marriage came in 1982, to the director Dennis Berry; they divorced in 1994.

• Anna Karina (Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer), actor, born 22 September 1940; died 14 December 2019

Ronald Bergan
first published in:
www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/16/anna-karina-obituary