Anouk Aimée, the French actress known for her elegance and cool sophistication in films including Claude Lelouch's “A Man and a Woman” (1966), Fellini classics “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and “8½” (1963) and Jacques Demy’s “Lola” (1961), died on Tuesday. She was 92.

Aimée’s daughter, Manuela Papatakis, confirmed her death in a post on Instagram. 

“With my daughter, Galaad, and my granddaughter, Mila, we have great sadness to announce the departure of my mother Anouk Aimée,” she wrote. “I was right by her side when she passed away this morning at her home in Paris.”

Fairly described in one encyclopedia as an “an aloof but alluring presence on the screen,” Aimée was frequently described as ““regal,” “intelligent” and “enigmatic,” giving the actress, according to journalist Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “an aura of disturbing and mysterious beauty that has earned her the status of one of the hundred sexiest stars in film history (in a 1995 poll conducted by Empire magazine).”

Aimée was Oscar-nominated for best actress for her role opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant in “A Man and a Woman” — one of a relatively small number of actors to be so nominated for a performance in a foreign film. The movie’s director, Claude Lelouch, was also nominated (he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes), and “A Man and a Woman” won Oscars for best original screenplay and foreign language film.

The film, made on a small budget, was also an enormous commercial success. Aimée played a production assistant in the movie business who meets a race-car driver played by Trintignant at a school where each has a child boarding.

Reviewing the 1966 film for the DVD Verdict website in 2003, Dan Mancini wrote that “A Man and a Woman” serves as “a reminder that the sleekly produced modern Hollywood romance isn’t the only way to go, that romantic films can benefit from the raw aesthetics of the low-budget independent. Aimée and Trintignant are movie-star pretty, but Lelouch’s style gives them both a weighty humanity, as do their performances. Like any respectable disciple of the French New Wave, Lelouch gives his actors plenty of room to improvise, to get to the heart of a scene via whatever path feels natural. The tentative nature of the interactions between Aimée and Trintignant — their halting eye contact, pregnant pauses, nervous laughs — undercuts (in a good way) their sparkling good looks and movie-star mystique.”

Back in 1965, Variety said: “Anouk Aimée has a mature beauty and an ability to project an inner quality that helps stave off the obvious banality of her character, and this goes too for the perceptive Jean-Louis Trintignant as the man.”

(Lelouch brought the two actors back together for 1986’s “A Man and a Woman, Twenty Years Later,” which was far less successful.)

Carmel Dagan