Ah...Anna.

Anna Karina is not only an incredible actress who has been in seven of Jean-Luc Godard's movies, she is also a model, singer and novelist, even to this day she is still active.

Originally from Denmark, the moved to Paris at age 17 and very quickly was approached by an advertisement company, became a fashion model and met Pierre Cardin and Coco Chanel, who advised her to use the name Anna Karina instead of her real name Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer.

I found a fairly recent interview of Anna Karina, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Serge Gainsbourg who she collaborated with on a musical. (The interview is not translated in English sadly, but here's the video anyway!)

In that interview, she talks about how she ended up in that musical called Anna."I simply got a phone call saying "Would you like to be in a musical?" I was so happy, it was my dream, ever since I was a little girl. When they said it would be called Anna, I asked them why they chose my name. They answered "Because we haven't found another title!" "

Serge Gainsbourg wrote and collaborated with Anna on seven songs in that musical, two of which are "Sous le Soleil Exactement" and "Roller Girl" who were great successes at the time.

 

 Anna Karina - Sous le Soleil Exactement

 

Serge Gainsbourg's version of Sous le Soleil Exactement 

  

In 2010, she has collaborated with a French singer Philippe Katerine (known as a very eccentric "crazy" performer in France) for the audio version of her rewrite of "The Ugly Duckling". She said about this novel by Hans Christian Andersen: "I modernized it. It's the first story I read when I was little. Immediately I felt close to the ugly duckling. When I was little I was very ugly. I'm not pretty today but I was a very ugly girl until the age of 13-14. It's around that time that boys started turning around in the street to look at me and sometimes they would whistle!" she says laughing and hiding her red face behind her two hands. "It doesn't seem like it, but I am very shy."