Nathalie Baye, the four-time César winner who was discovered in films by François Truffaut, died Saturday at 77, her agent said, adding that she was very malade. Born July 6, 1948, Baye built one of French cinema’s most durable careers, with credits that included La Balance, Juste la fin du monde and Le Petit Lieutenant.
Her death lands at the end of more than five decades in film, and it also brings back a relationship that made her a familiar name far beyond the movie world. Baye and Johnny Hallyday met in 1982 on a Maritie and Gilbert Carpentier television show, during a sketch titled Quoi de neuf ma jolie ? written by Philippe Labro, and she later said she did not want to do it and that Johnny was not her thing.
She said in 2009 that Hallyday arrived an hour and a half late, which annoyed her, but that she then saw a very shy man surrounded by bronzed and blond men and found him touching. Hallyday wrote in his autobiography Dans mes yeux that he fell madly in love with her, and Baye later described him as disarming, shy, charming and very funny. The two moved into a pavilion in the Yvelines, had a daughter, Laura Smet, on November 15, 1983, and separated in March 1986.
Baye’s death closes the book on a figure who moved easily between popular fame and serious acting, and whose brief partnership with Hallyday became part of French cultural memory. The unanswered question now is not who she was, but how many audiences will return to the films that made her one of the country’s most recognizable stars.