Anouk Aimée Against the Wall", 1958). Besides the French cinema, Aimée's career include a number of films made in Spain, Great Britain, Italy and Germany. She achieved worldwide attention in Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" (the Good Life, 1960) and "Lola" (1961). She appeared again in Fellini's "8½", and would remain in Italy during the first half of the 1960s, making films for a number of Italian directors. Because of her role in "La Dolce Vita", biographer Dave Thompson describes Aimée as a "rising star who exploded" onto the film world. He adds that singer-songwriter Patti Smith, who in her teens saw the
La Dolce Vita because they rendered a woman very gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside." Credit for the creation of Steiner, the intellectual who commits suicide after shooting his two children, goes to co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli. Having gone to school with Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, Pinelli had closely followed the writer's career and felt that his over-intellectualism had become emotionally sterile, leading to his suicide in a Turin hotel in 1950. This idea of a "burnt-out existence" is carried over to Steiner in the party episode where the sounds of nature are not to be experienced first-hand