French actress Nathalie Baye dies at 77

French movie star Nathalie Baye, a multi-Cesar Award winner who starred in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can, has died on the age of 77, her household informed AFP on Saturday (Apr 18).

Baye, a stalwart of French cinema, starred in some 80 movies and took residence the very best actress Cesar – France’s equal of the Oscars – 4 occasions, together with three years working from 1981 to 1983.

She died Friday night at her residence in Paris from Lewy physique dementia, her household mentioned.

The neurodegenerative illness can alter temper, motion and provoke hallucinations.

Baye’s profession noticed a late surge of internationally high-profile roles, together with enjoying Leonardo DiCaprio’s mom in Catch Me if You Can and a French aristocrat in Downton Abbey 2.

She additionally labored with Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, who solid her as one in every of his many troublesome moms in Laurence Anyways and It’s Only the End of the World.

Une liaison pornographique – whose English title was the extra demure An Affair of Love – received her the very best actress prize on the Venice movie pageant.

Baye had a five-year relationship with rocker Johnny Hallyday, dubbed the “French Elvis”,  whose loss of life in 2017 sparked nationwide mourning. 

Their daughter Laura Smet can be a well-known actress, who starred alongside Baye as a mock model of themselves – bickering, aggressive, but very shut – within the hit collection Call My Agent!.

Baye was born in 1948 in Normandy to bohemian mother and father who had been each painters. But battling dyslexia, she left faculty at 14 and went to Monaco to study dance. 

Her breakthrough got here within the Seventies when she teamed up with arthouse administrators resembling Francois Truffaut, Maurice Pialat and Claude Sautet, after which within the Eighties with Jean-Luc Godard.