Nathalie Baye, 1948 – 2026

Nathalie Baye, a French actress also well known in the US, died on April 17 in Paris. She was 77. Baye appeared in such films as Truffaut’s Day for Night, The Man Who Loved Women, and The Green Room, Robert Wise’s Two People, Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself and Detective, and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can, as well as Le Retour de Martin Guerre, winning eight César Awards in her long career. Her romantic partners included actor Philippe Léotard and singer Johnny Hallyday (with whom she had a daughter, actress Laura Smet). Baye was also a trained dancer, and stage actress. “I've been lucky to make a lot of films, to work with very talented directors,” Baye said. “But it was the first movie I made, Day for Night, by François Truffaut, that allowed me to discover cinema and made me love cinema. I was working toward a career in theater rather than in film. But with Truffaut, working on a story about a film shoot, it was magical.” She added that “I like acting with other people, the knowledge that the better they are, the better we all are together, the better the film will be. I'm much, much more interested in a small part in a good project than a big part in a bad one.”