Nathalie Baye, a French actress known for her roles within the film Downton Abbey: A Recent Era and Catch Me If You Can, has died. She was 77.
Baye died on Friday at her home in Paris from complications of Lewy body dementia, her family told the Agence France-Presse.
Born on July 6, 1948, in Mainneville, Eure, Normandy, Baye began her profession within the Seventies, appearing in greater than 80 movies. She graduated from France’s Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique (National Academy of Dramatic Arts) in 1972. Baye made her film debut that very same yr in Robert Smart’s Two People.
She later appeared in movies comparable to Truffaut’s Day for Night, The Man Who Loved Women, The Green Room, Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself, Detective, Le Retour de Martin Guerre and Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning Catch Me If You Can, where she played the mother of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Frank Abagnale Jr. and opposite Tom Hanks.
Her work has also been recognized critically, as she’s a ten-time nominee of the distinguished César Awards and four-time winner. She won for Every Man for Himself (1980), Strange Affair (1981), La Balance (1982) and The Young Lieutenant (2005). In 2022, she appeared within the movie Downton Abbey: A Recent Era, where she shared the screen with Maggie Smith in certainly one of her final film roles, before she died in 2024. Mother Valley (2023) was Baye’s last film role.
She shared one daughter, Laura Smet, who can also be an actress with the late French singer Johnny Hallyday. Baye and Laura starred together in a 2015 episode of Call My Agent! Laura has booked a component within the upcoming fourth season of HBO’s The White Lotus.
Following the news of her death, French President Emmanuel Macron took to social media to pay tribute. “We loved Nathalie Baye a lot,” he wrote on X Saturday morning. “She accompanied, through her voice, her smiles, and her reserve, these last a long time of French cinema, from François Truffaut to Tonie Marshall. An actress with whom we loved, dreamed, and grew up. We expect of her family and her family members.”
Baye is survived by Laura.