French film star Nathalie Baye dead at 77: family to AFP

PARIS (AFP): French film star Nathalie Baye, a multi-Cesar Award winner who starred in Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me if You Can,” has died at the age of 77, her family told AFP on Saturday.

Baye, a stalwart of French cinema, starred in some 80 films and took home the best actress Cesar – France’s equivalent of the Oscars – four times, including three years running from 1981 to 1983.

She died Friday evening at her home in Paris from Lewy body dementia, her family said.

The neurodegenerative disease can alter mood, movement and provoke hallucinations.

Baye’s career saw 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 “Downton Abbey 2”.

She also worked with Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, who cast her as one of his many difficult mothers in “Laurence Anyways” and “It’s Only the End of the World”.

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

Their daughter Laura Smet is also a famous actress, who starred alongside Baye as a mock version of themselves – bickering, competitive, yet very close – in the hit series “Call My Agent!”.

Baye was born in 1948 in Normandy to bohemian parents who were both painters. But 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 arthouse directors such as Francois Truffaut, Maurice Pialat and Claude Sautet, and then in the 1980s with Jean-Luc Godard.