Nathalie Baye, the French actress who won four Cesar Awards and played Leonardo DiCaprio's mother in Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can," died on Friday evening at her home in Paris after a battle with Lewy body dementia. She was seventy-seven. Her family confirmed the death to Agence France-Presse on Saturday. [1][2]

Baye was born in Mainneville, Normandy in July 1948 to two painters, stopped her schooling at fourteen to study ballet at Marika Besobrasova's academy in Monaco, and pivoted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique at the end of the 1960s. Her first major role came in 1973 in Francois Truffaut's "Day for Night." A ten-time Cesar nominee, Baye won four statues — for "Every Man for Himself" (1980), "Strange Affair" (1981), "La Balance" (1982) and "The Young Lieutenant" (2005). [3] Three of the four came in consecutive years, a statistical idiosyncrasy of the early-1980s French film establishment not repeated since.

Baye worked across the generations. Truffaut, Godard and Sautet early; Pialat and Mermoud through the middle; Xavier Dolan's "It's Only the End of the World" and the 2022 "Downton Abbey: A New Era" late. In the United States she played the virologist Francoise Barré-Sinoussi in the 1993 television film "And the Band Played On." Her four-year relationship with the singer Johnny Hallyday produced the actress Laura Smet, her surviving child.

President Emmanuel Macron said on X Saturday that "with her voice, her smile and her grace, she has been a constant presence in French cinema over the past few decades, from Francois Truffaut to Tonie Marshall." Isabelle Adjani, who shared the screen with Baye in 1974's "La Gifle," called her "the actress of my eighteen years." [1] France Télévisions and Canal+ reshuffled Sunday programming to air a run of her films. What a country does when it mourns an actress at scale is a measure of what it thought she meant.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles