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20 Friday Lifestyle | Features Friday, March 9, 2018 Sixties icon Anna Karina revels in comeback at 77 nna Karina is wondering whether to say how many times some cigarettes’ and come back three weeks later.” At the be- she has been married. “Oh la la! I prefer not to,” laughed ginning Godard’s dark glasses made him appear “scary” before Athe actress and director who was the face of the French Karina discovered his “magnificent almond eyes”. But their love New Wave. “Less than Liz Taylor,” she joked, who went up the did not survive the loss of a child she was carrying. It has been aisle eight times. “I’ve been married to the same man for the last 20 years since she saw or heard from the reclusive director. “He 40 years,” Karina protested, referring to her fourth husband, the is in Switzerland and doesn’t open his door,” said Karina. “No, American director Dennis Berry of “Stargate” and “Highlander” it doesn’t make me sad. It’s his life after all.” fame. But it was with her first, Jean-Luc Godard, that Karina For all the talk of how the New Wave revolutionized cinema, helped turn cinema on its head. the only women who ended up behind the camera were her and Now 77, the Danish-born Sixties icon is having something of Agnes Varda. Karina’s film, “Vivre ensemble”, is a tragic love a comeback. Her 1973 film “Vivre ensemble” (Live Together) is story about a couple who can’t do exactly that. A romance be- back in cinemas, winning praise from the critics as a “little gem”. tween a history teacher and a free spirited young women ends And she has a new album out, fittingly called “I am an Adven- in drugs and domestic violence. “It is a portrait of my youth. I turer.” “I never expected this, it’s amazing,” she said, not having saw people around me go down and die,” she recalled. made a film in a decade or recorded a song for even longer. Sit- Danish-French actress Anna Karina poses during a photo session At the time, Karina was the first French actress to direct a ting at a restaurant table in the once bohemian Saint Germain in Paris, on March 2, 2018. — AFP feature film, and “everybody was saying, ‘How dare she.’ There des Pres on Paris’ Left Bank, Karina is as striking and elfin as miss. As the poster girl for Palmolive soap as well as one of its was a real macho attitude.” “I even thought for a while of using ever, her kholed blue eyes burning out from under a felt hat. It rivals, her face stared down from billboards on both sides of the a man’s name because I was afraid of the reaction.” Despite star- was around the corner at the Deux Magots cafe, then the hang- grand Paris avenue. ring in more than 30 films, at first directing freaked her out. But out of Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus, where Karina was dis- He offered her a nude scene in “Breathless”, his first and most Karina knew she didn’t want to work in an off-the-cuff whirlwind covered 60 years ago, a 17-year-old waif in full flight from a famous film, but she refused. They were already a couple when, manner like Godard, “who could do everything in five minutes”. troubled childhood. at barely 21, she won best actress at the Berlin film festival for Macho attitudes were not just confined to the critics. Karina his “A Woman is a Woman” in 1961. But Godard was not the ideal will never forget being summoned by the press agent of “A Renamed by Coco Chanel partner for someone who had hardly known her father and had Woman is a Woman” and finding him-as Harvey Weinstein is al- It was also where she became Anna Karina. One day after been all but abandoned by her mother. “We loved each other a leged to have been-almost naked in his bathrobe at the door of modeling for a magazine “this extraordinary woman asked me, lot,” Karina told AFP, “but it was complicated to live with him”- his apartment. “I was so shocked that I leapt down the stairs and ‘What’s your name, darling?’ “‘Hanne Karin Bayer,’ I said.” “No, a sentiment shared by his next wife, Anne Wiazemsky, whose ac- I nearly broke my neck. “When a woman does not want some- no,” the woman replied, “you will be called Anna Karina.” The count of their short marriage is the basis of the new film, thing to go on she has to say stop. “And she always has the right woman was Coco Chanel, the founder of the fashion house that “Redoubtable”. to change her mind,” Karina insisted. — AFP still bears her name. And so began an incredible career as a model, actor, singer, director and muse. Godard spotted her Godard’s disappearing acts while he was walking on the Champs Elysees. She was hard to “He was someone who could say to you, ‘I am going to get Cranberries Lionel Richie honored at to release Hollywood handprints ceremony album despite O’Riordan death our-time Grammy winner Lionel Richie cemented his legacy Lionel Brockman Richie Jr. was born on June 20, 1949 and raised Fin Hollywood Wednesday, plunging his feet and hands into a on the private, historically black Tuskegee Institute university cam- rish rockers The Cranberries said Wednesday they wet paving slab at the forecourt of the iconic TCL Chinese pus in Alabama, where his family had worked for generations. A Iwould go ahead with a new album despite the sud- Theatre. The 68-year-old R&B singer, a former front man for Mo- high school tennis star, he accepted a scholarship to study at the den death of singer Dolores O’Riordan in January. town legends The Commodores, has sold more than 100 million institute but dropped out and seriously considered becoming a The surviving three members of The Cranberries said records over a career spanning six decades. “This is almost beyond priest for a while. He formed a series of bands and, while still at col- that O’Riordan had already recorded vocals for a new the childhood dream,” Richie told AFP at the ceremony on Holly- lege in 1968, joined aspiring Motown group The Commodores, album, which the band now hopes to finish and release wood Boulevard, a time-honored tradition launched in the 1920s. playing saxophone and singing. He went on to write some of his in early 2019. “When I first came to this town, the Holiday Inn was back there, most enduring songs for the group, including “Still,” “Sail On,” The Cranberries said that they also would move for- right behind me, and the first thing I did was ran out the room, came “Easy” and “Three Times a Lady,” which earned a 1979 American ward with a 25th anniversary reissue this year of their downstairs and put my feet in all the hands and feet on the ground. Music Award and a People’s Choice Award. debut album, “Everyone Else is Doing it, So Why Can’t Now, my hands and feet are going into this thing, it’s almost beyond We?,” after putting work on hold following O’Riordan’s belief.” Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, fresh off his Os- Motown hits death. “After much consideration we have decided to cars hosting duties, presented the ceremony while veteran actor He later wrote “Lady” for Kenny Rogers and had a huge hit finish what we started,” the band wrote on Facebook. Samuel L. Jackson was on hand to support Richie, who told the alongside Diana Ross with “Endless Love,” which became the most “We thought about it and decided that as this is some- crowd the honor was an “out of body experience.” successful single in Motown history, topping the US charts for nine thing that we started as a band, with Dolores, we should weeks. Alongside Michael Jackson and Prince, he was one of the push ahead and finish it.” most successful male solo artists of the 1980s, with a run of 13 con- The 1993 album proved to be an international suc- secutive top ten hits in the US Billboard charts, five of them number cess led by “Linger,” a wistful song about a first kiss. ones. He scored a major hit with “All Night Long,” and won an The reissued edition will be remastered and feature Oscar for “Say You, Say Me,” written for the film “White Nights.” previously unreleased material from the era, the band His Grammys include the 1985 Song of the Year prize for “We Are said. O’Riordan was found dead in a London hotel on the World,” co-written with Jackson. January 15 at age 46. A full inquest into her death is set Richie managed a nine-year streak of writing at least one num- for April 3, although authorities are not treating her ber one single a year-a feat matched only by Irving Berlin-enjoying death as suspicious. With a voice that merged florid much of his success internationally, with a particularly strong fol- traditional Celtic singing with the ferocity of punk lowing in the Arab world. But his run came to an end in 1987 and rock, O’Riordan defined the sound of The Cranberries Richie took some time out, coming back in the 1990s, with mixed whose major hits also included the politically charged results.

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