Nathalie Baye

A former dancer who began her film career as the woman Peter Fonda has a brief affair with in "Two People" (1983), Nathalie Baye enjoyed her first brush with fame as Francois Truffaut's script girl assistant in the award-winning "Day for Night" (1973), uttering perhaps one of that film's more memorable lines: "I might leave a man for a movie, but I would never leave a movie for a man!" By the end of the decade, after two more Truffaut films and finely controlled performances in Bertrand Tavernier's "A Week's Vacation" (1980) and Claude Goretta's "A Girl from Lorraine" (1980), Baye had emerged as one of France's leading actresses, capable of a wide range of roles and demonstrating a constant maturity, not unlike American actresses like Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis. Among her internationally known films are Bob Swaim's slick thriller "La Balance," for which she won a Best Actress Cesar as a prostitute involved with a petty thief, and as the wife of a soldier (Gerard Depardieu) who comes home from war after many years in the medieval drama "The Return of Martin Guerre" (both 1982).

Baye had won her first Cesar as Best Supporting Actress for Jean-Luc Godard's "Sauve qui peut .., la vie/Every Man For Himself" (1979), as a woman leaving her husband for a life in the country, and would later reteamed with the director for "Detective" (1984). Her second Best Supporting Actress Cesar was for "Une etrange affaire" (1981), again as an unhappily married woman. In 1990, the actress had one of her best roles as an actress who sacrifices her family in pursuit of fame and fortune in "Every Other Weekend," a role that was written expressly for her. Baye also shone as a pregnant, HIV-positive woman in "Mensonge/The Lie" (1993) and portrayed Dr. Francoise Borre, who worked on the identification of the HIV virus, in HBO's Emmy-winning "And the Band Played On" (1993).

As the 90s drew to a close and she approached an age when most actress find it difficult securing leading roles, Baye continued to offer superlative performances. In 1998's "Venus Beaute Institut," written and directed by Tonie Marshall, she essayed Angele, a fortyish beautician who has shut herself off from the possibility of love only to be ardently pursued by a young sculptor. The following year, Baye turned in a strong, sensual portrayal as a woman who seeks to satisfy a sexual fantasy via a personal ad which leads to an odd and touching relationship in "Une Liaison pornographique/An Affair of Love." She then played a victim of blackmail in the drama "Selon Matthieu/According to Matthieu" (2000).