Une Femme est une Femme

Anna Karina is my absolute favourite movie actress of all time.  This isn’t surprising – I am a committed Francophile, and Karina was wife and muse to my favourite director, Jean Luc Godard, during his “golden period” of the early to mid sixties.  Together, despite an often stormy relationship, they made eight films together, all of which are classics of the French New Wave.

However, this idol of La Nouvelle Vague was actually born Hanne Bayer in Denmark.  After hitch-hiking to Paris in 1958 following a row with her mother, she found herself broke on the streets of the French capital until fortune smiled on her in the form of an advertising executive who discovered her at a café.  It was in an advert for Palmolive Soap that she was seen by Godard, the new golden boy of French cinema following the success of his debut feature ‘A Bout de Souffle’ (‘Breathless’), thus beginning one of the great director-actor partnerships in movie history.