As everyone knows, my dear Anouk, cats are creatures not easily beguiled. And yet your charm works on them, so why not on men, one might well imagine. Charm, as in beauty, grace, elegance, the very incarnation of femininity and its mystery, but not only this. The femme fatale in dark glasses, with her bright face under her long dark hair, seductive and photogenic, and that all too undeniable elegance, is, of course, none other than you!

You're good-looking, admits Trintignant in "A Man and a Woman". Good-looking? You are undoubtedly one of the most beautiful of all those legendary women, most often in Hollywood, to whom we owe to the cinema. Yet that alone is not enough to become a star. Fellini, who was to be the most momentous rendezvous in your entire life, discovered in you an extraordinary actress. An eternal lover. Trembling or haughty, sensual or fragile, but above all, feminine to your very fingertips!

To become a star, a mythical actress, a living legend with that eternal silhouette, that of a long-legged adolescent diving nude into the Adige in "The Lovers of Verona", required of you to bestow on your characters an existence rich in emotional restraint. And so, contrary to the title of Astruc's film, it is not with you that we should fear "Bad Liaisons". In "The Crimson Curtain", with your bare foot brushing up against the boot of a dashing soldier, I could barely hear the beautiful text by Barbey d'Aureville. And Jeanne, Modigliani's companion, who was to accompany the painter right up to his death, or the melancholic and neurotic aristocrat in "La Dolce Vita" and Luisa in "8½", not to forget the cabaret dancer in "Lola" who appears so beautiful, so radiant, in her basque and boa, or the woman who rediscovers how to love after a marital strife in the most famous of Lelouch's films…

The some eighty pictures which you've shot are all filled with a powerful lust for life which precludes neither exquisite gravity nor ethereal unconcern. In cinema as in life, you have lived passionately. You love to love as you love to laugh. A laughter crossed by a suspicion of irony and mockery. You are as light as air, you float high above the pettiness of our contemporaries. Your warm, musical, touching voice seems eternally in search of approval. While, in keeping with Molly Bloom's monologue, we ask no more than to say to you: yes, yes, yes, a hundred times yes!

Nevertheless, you seem unsure of yourself, disconcerting by dint of hesitation, is this good? you ask, gently lifting once again a lock of hair, is this better? We took for whims of a star what was merely the desire to do your best. You cultivate capricious indecision, not seeming to really know what you want, but still you go on searching even long after you've finally found it! For you do not run after success but rather after a beautiful piece of work, and, on a career level - such a horrid expression! - you have always preferred to let life decide in your stead. Life and experience which have only nourished your infallible instinct all the more, and perhaps that of great film directors as well.

You have shot with Cayatte, Becker, Astruc, Aldrich, Cukor, Franju, de Sica, Delvaux, Lumet, Demy, Lelouch, Skolimovski, Altman, Kaurismaki, and many many others, and, of course, with the one who invented for you a first name, coined by Henri Calef, even more delicious than your own, "Anoukina bella", as Federico would tenderly call you.

All have sung the praises of your admirable and disenchanted face with its prodigious harmony between elation and that melancholy that went on to become your hallmark. That delicate balance as well between the class of an actress and the peacefulness of daily existence. A simplicity and restraint which do not preclude outbursts and fury. You are both the indecipherable and the familiar, close and distant, reassuring and ardent, simple and sophisticated. You appear at one and the same moment modest and intense. Time leaves no traces on your face, firstly, as I am intimately convinced, for you are a good person. One who is concerned about the well-being of her friends. And secondly because of that other Anouk, who resembles you like a sister, and who exists above all in our dreams.

I can love only if I am loved, you said one day. Yet, Anouk, you belong to the history of cinema, to every film lover the world over who bow down at your feet to tell you: I love you! I too shall bow down at your feet, unsure that I'll be able to rise up again, to bestow with you, in the name of all, the Palme d'Or of the Festival. It is yours, love and cherish it well.

Gilles JACOB