Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin.
French postcard at Editions P.I., Paris, no. 3647. Photo: Eva Sereny / Sygma.
Recognised as one of France's leading actresses
Nathalie Marie Andrée Baye was born in Mainneville, Normandy, in 1948. She grew up in unconventional circumstances as the daughter of a bohemian painter couple, Claude Baye and Denise Coustet. She was dyslexic, dropped out of school at the age of fourteen and took ballet lessons in Monaco. Three years later, at age 17, she toured with a dance company in the United States. She stayed in New York to complete her training with the Ballets Russes and to broaden her horizons.
On her return, she attended the Cours Simon and then the Conservatoire, which she completed in 1972. Baye made her film debut as Giselle in Faustine et le bel été / Faustine and the Beautiful Summer (Nina Companeez, 1972), starring Isabelle Adjani. The next year, she became famous with the supporting role of the script girl Joëlle in the film La Nuit américaine / Day for Night (1973) by François Truffaut.
After that, she worked with another great director, Maurice Pialat, on La gueule ouverte / The Mouth Agape (1974). Other supporting roles followed, including a brief appearance in Truffaut's L'Homme qui aimait les femmes / The Man Who Loved Women (François Truffaut, 1977). Throughout the 1970s, she played the good girlfriend or nice provincial girl in film and television. She played her first major leading role as Truffaut's partner in his film drama La Chambre verte / The Green Room (François Truffaut, 1978).
Since the early 1980s, she has been recognised as one of France's leading actresses, thanks to performances such as in Claude Goretta's La Provinciale / The Girl from Lorraine (1981). Baye has been honoured with four César awards: Best Supporting Actress in 1981 for Sauve qui peut (la vie) / Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980) and 1982 for Une étrange affair / Strange Affair (Pierre Granier-Deferre, 1981) as well as Best Actress in a Leading Role in 1983 for La Balance / The Nark (Bob Swaim, 1982).
After changing her image by playing a streetwalker in La Balance, she widened her scope with more obscure characters in J'ai épousé une ombre / I Married a Shadow (Robin Davis, 1983) and En toute innocence / No Harm Intended (Alain Jessua, 1988). In 1986, she returned to the theatre with an interpretation of 'Adriana Monti'. At the Venice Film Festival in 1999, she received the award for Best Actress for her role in Une liaison pornographique / A Pornographic Relationship (Frédéric Fonteyne, 1999) with Sergi Lopéz. Her other film successes include her role as a teacher in Une semaine de vacances / Holidays for a Week (Bertrand Tavernier, 1980) and she was one the beauticians in the highly acclaimed Vénus Beauté (Institut) / Venus Beauty Institute (Tonie Marshall, 1999), which won multiple César Awards, including for Best Film.
French postcard by Editions La Malibran, Paris, no. CF 32. Photo: Pierre Zucca. François Truffaut and Nathalie Baye in La Nuit Américaine (François Truffaut, 1973).
A celebrity couple with a French Rock and Roll legend
Nathalie Baye has appeared in more than 65 films. Most of these are French-language, though not exclusively. For instance, she starred in the American films Two People (Robert Wise, 1972) with Lindsay Wagner and Peter Fonda, The Man Inside (Bobby Roth, 1990), alongside Jürgen Prochnow and Monique van de Ven, and Catch Me If You Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002) starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks.
From 1982 to 1986, Baye formed a celebrity couple with French Rock and Roll legend Johnny Hallyday. Together, they made the film Détective (1984), directed by Jean-Luc Godard. With Hallyday, she had a daughter, Laura Smet, in 1983.
Laura Smet has also played several film roles since 2003. In 2017, Baye starred for the first time with her daughter in an episode of the TV series Dix pour Cent / Call My Agent! (2015) about the lives and jobs of people working at a talent agency in Paris. The two women were reunited for the first time in the cinema by Xavier Beauvois in Les Gardiennes / The Guardians, a historical drama set in 1915.
In 2006, Nathalie Baye won her fourth César for her role as a middle-aged woman detective in Le petit lieutenant / The Young Lieutenant (Xavier Beauvois, 2005). Young Canadian film prodigy Xavier Dolan offered her the role of the mother of a man wanting to have a sex change in Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan, 2012).
More recent films in which she appeared include the French drama-thriller La Volante / The Assistant (Christophe Ali, Nicolas Bonilauri, 2015), the drama Juste la fin du monde / It's Only the End of the World (Xavier Dolan, 2016) and the historical drama Downton Abbey: A New Era (Simon Curtis, 2022) from a screenplay by Julian Fellowes. It is the sequel to Downton Abbey (Michael Engler, 2019), based on the television series of the same name created by Fellowes.
French autograph card by Editions P.I., Paris. Photo: Sygma.
French autograph card by Editions P.I., Paris. Photo: Sygma. Check out the differences.
Sources: Allociné (French), Wikipedia (Dutch, French and English) and IMDb.
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