Nathalie Baye, prolific star of French and Hollywood cinema, dies aged 77

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The French film star Nathalie Baye , who starred in Steven Spielberg ’s Catch Me If You Can , has died at the age of 77, her family said on Saturday.

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The French film star Nathalie Baye, who starred in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, has died at the age of 77, her family said on Saturday.

Baye, a stalwart of French cinema, starred in about 80 films and took home the best actress César, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, four times, including three years running from 1981 to 1983. She died on Friday evening at her home in Paris from Lewy body dementia, her family told AFP.

Baye’s career included a late surge of internationally high-profile roles, including playing Leonardo DiCaprio’s mother in Catch Me if You Can and a French aristocrat in the Downton Abbey sequel, A New Era. She also worked with the Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan, who cast her in Laurence Anyways and It’s Only the End of the World.

Baye, centre, with Gérard Depardieu in The Return of Martin Guerre. Photograph: Cinetext/France 3/Allstar

Baye had a five-year relationship with the rock and roll singer Johnny Hallyday, nicknamed the “French Elvis”, whose death in 2017 led to national mourning. Their daughter Laura Smet is also an actor, and starred alongside Baye as mock versions of themselves in the hit series Call My Agent!

Baye was born in 1948 in Normandy to bohemian parents who were both painters. After struggling with dyslexia, she left school at 14 and went to Monaco to learn dance. Her breakthrough came in the 1970s when she teamed up with directors such as François Truffaut (for whom she played a continuity supervisor in Day for Night), Maurice Pialat and Claude Sautet.

Baye as Paula Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can. — Baye as Paula Abagnale, Frank Abagnale’s mother, in Catch Me If You Can. Photograph: Globe Photos/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

She was cast in a prominent role in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1980 film Every Man for Himself, for which she won the best supporting actress César, then made an international breakthrough as Gérard Depardieu’s wife in The Return of Martin Guerre. Baye’s best-known early role, however, was as a sex worker in Bob Swaim’s celebrated 1982 thriller La Balance, for which she again won a César award. Une liaison pornographique – whose English title was An Affair of Love – won her the best actress prize at the Venice film festival in 1999.