Anna Karina

Anna Karina  (born Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer on 22 September 1940) is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter. Karina is known as a muse of the French director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of pioneers of French New Wave. Her notable collaborations with Godard include The Little Soldier (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961) and Vivre sa vie (1962). With A Woman Is a Woman, Karina won the Best Actress award at the Berlin Film Festival.

She began her career in Denmark, where she sang in cabarets and worked as a model playing in commercials. Hanne Karin Bayer came to Paris in 1958 at age 17. She spoke no French and had no money, living off the streets. However, she had a lucky break when, sitting down briefly at the famous cafe Les Deux Magots, she was approached by a woman from an advertisement agency who asked her to do some photos. She rapidly became a very successful fashion model, meeting Pierre Cardin and Coco Chanel. It was Chanel who helped her devise her professional name, Anna Karina. Jean-Luc Godard, then a film critic for Cahiers du cinéma, first saw Karina in series of Palmolive ads in a bath covered in soapsuds. He offered her an small role in the film, but she refused when he mentioned that there would be a nude scene. The next year, however, Godard contacted her again to offer her a major role in Le Petit Soldat (1960). Karina, who was still a minor (under 21), had to persuade her estranged mother to sign the contract for her. Godard and Karina married on 3 March 1961, during the shooting of Une femme est une femme, and divorced in 1967. Karina was awarded best actress at the Berlin Film Festival in 1961 for her interpretation of the character Angela in the film Une femme est une femme. Her acting career was not, however, limited to Godard's films, and she went on to a successful collaboration with other well-known directors. Her role in Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Diderot (1967) directed by Jacques Rivette is considered by some as her best performance. She also acted in Luchino Visconti's L'Etranger, amongst many others. At the end of the 1960s, she scored a major hit with "Sous le soleil exactement" and "Roller Girl" by Serge Gainsbourg, both songs taken from the TV musical comedy Anna (1967) by the film director Pierre Koralnik in which she sings seven songs alongside Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Brialy. She subsequently recorded an album Une histoire d'amour with Philippe Katerine, which was followed up by a concert tour. Karina has also written three novels and made several appearances on television.

In 2005 she released Chansons de films, a collection of songs sung in movies. Karina wrote, directed and starred in Victoria, a musical road movie filmed in Montreal, Quebec and Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean in 2007. The movie was premiered at the Pusan Film Festival in Korea in 2008.

With Anthony Quinn in "The Magus" (1968)

With Jean Paul Belmondo in "Pierrot Le Fou" (1965)

With Serge Gainsbourg

With Jean- Luc Godard

(wikipedia, imdb, fanpop, fanpix)