Anna Karina

Anna Karina is often at the top of everyone's list as a favorite French actress of the nouvelle vague, except that she was born in Copenhagen, not France!

Anna's career began in Denmark, where she sang in cabarets, worked as a model, studied dance and painting, and acted in short films and commercials.
At the age of seventeen she moved to Paris, where things seem to play out like a sort of 20th century fairy-tale: she met designers Pierre Cardin and Coco Chanel, and as a rising fashion model was noticed by filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who was in the midst of casting À bout de souffle and wanted her for an important role. Although it is Jean Seberg in that film, not Anna, she went on to marry Godard in 1961 during the filming of his next feature, in which she played the lead: Une femme est une femme. As Godard's wife and muse, she acted in eight of his films before the couple divorced in 1967: Vivre sa vie: Film en Douze Tableaux (1962), Le petit soldat (1963), Bande à part (1964), Pierrot le fou and Alphaville (both 1965), Made in U.S.A. (1966) and Le Plus vieux métier du monde (1967).

Her career was not, however, limited to Godard's films - Anna has had not only a prolific and successful life as an actress, but also a singing career (most importantly with Serge Gainsbourg), and is the writer of three novels.