At the age of 77, the French actress Nathalie Baye, known from Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, and winner of several French César film awards, died. The death of the actress was reported on Saturday by her family, TASR writes, according to a report by the AFP agency.
The family said that Baye suffered from dementia with Lewy bodies and died of the disease on Friday evening at her home in Paris. During her rich career, Baye appeared in approximately 80 films and won the César award for best actress four times – the French equivalent of the film Oscars. The film Pornographic relationship brought her the award for best actress at the Venice Film Festival.
She is also known for the movie Catch Me If You Can, in which she starred alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, or thanks to her character as a French aristocrat in the film Downton Manor: A New Era. She also collaborated with the Canadian director Xavier Dolan, who cast her in the roles of troubled mothers in the films Laurence Anyways and It’s Only the End of the World.
The actress had a daughter Laura Smetová with the French singer, composer and actor Johnny Hallyday, who is also an actress, and starred with her mother in the series I want to talk to my agent!.
Baye was born on July 6, 1948 in Normandy. Her parents were painters. Due to problems with dyslexia, she left school at the age of 14 and went to Monaco, where she started a dance school. Three years later, she left for the United States.
She experienced a breakthrough in her career in the 1970s, when she collaborated with French directors Francois Truffaut, Maurice Pialat and Claude Sautet, and later in the 1980s with Jean-Luc Godard.
