Nathalie Baye, one of the most celebrated and versatile actresses in French cinema history, died on Friday evening at her home in Paris at the age of 77. Her family confirmed the news on Saturday. According to those close to her, she had been suffering from Lewy body dementia, a progressive neurodegenerative disease, in the final period of her life.

Born on 6 July 1948 in Mainneville, a village in the Normandy region of northern France, Baye grew up the daughter of bohemian painter parents. She left school at 14, struggled with dyslexia and dyscalculia, and pursued dance training in Monaco and New York before returning to Paris at 18 to study acting. It was her encounter with director François Truffaut that launched her film career, with a role in his 1973 classic Day for Night — a film about the making of a film — becoming her breakthrough. "You're a real one; you need to learn to protect yourself," the late actress Romy Schneider once told her, advice Baye took to heart in her famously private personal life.

Over five decades, Baye built an extraordinary filmography spanning art-house cinema and mainstream comedy, working with directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Bertrand Blier, Tonie Marshall, and Xavier Dolan. She won four César awards — France's equivalent of the Oscars — claiming three consecutive statuettes between 1981 and 1983 for supporting roles in Godard's Every Man for Himself and Pierre Granier-Deferre's A Strange Affair, and the best actress prize for Bob Swaim's La Balance. A fourth César came in 2006 for Xavier Beauvois's The Young Lieutenant. She also won the prestigious Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival. Internationally, she appeared as Leonardo DiCaprio's mother in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can and featured in the Downton Abbey film sequel.

Baye was equally admired for her stage work — spanning Chekhov to Marivaux — and for her television appearances, including a playful cameo as herself in the popular French series Call My Agent. Despite her fame, she was known for shunning the spotlight, describing her ideal as "gentle renown" rather than celebrity. In the 1980s she had a high-profile relationship with rock star Johnny Hallyday, with whom she had a daughter, Laura Smet, who also became an actress. Baye never married, saying she had "a need for freedom that can sometimes be difficult for others to live with."

French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute on social media, writing: "We loved Nathalie Baye so much. An actress with whom we loved, dreamed, and grew up. She accompanied these last decades of French cinema with her voice, her smiles, and her modesty." Her death closes a chapter in French cultural life — that of an actress who, as director Bertrand Tavernier once observed, possessed something beyond mere photogénie: "She knows how to make herself loved by the light."