Michel Piccoli mort à 94 ans – Un acteur de Français légendaire meurt dans les bras de sa femme après un accident vasculaire cérébral

French actor Michel Piccoli, a prolific screen star who has appeared in flagship films by directors such as Luis Bunuel and Jean-Luc Godard, has died.

He is said to have died in his wife’s arms at the age of 94 after suffering a stroke.

His family confirmed to French media on Monday that he died last week, but they did not give a cause of death.

Although less famous in the English-speaking world, in continental Europe and his native France Paris-born Piccoli was a mainstay of art home theater.

Beginning his career in the 1940s, he went on to make over 170 films, working into his late eighties.

Arguably her most memorable appearance came during French Nouvelle Vague starring Brigitte Bardot in Godard’s 1963 masterpiece, Contempt, with her dark hat and signature bushy eyebrows.

But Piccoli’s performances for Europe’s most iconic directors will also be remembered, including for the French Jean Renoir, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Pierre Melville, the British Alfred Hitchcock and the Spanish Bunuel.

For the Spanish director, Piccioli starred alongside Catherine Deneuve in the masterpiece Belle de Jour in 1967 and in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in 1972, which won the award for best foreign film at the Oscars in 1973.

Although he starred in Hitchcock’s English-language spy thriller Topaz in 1969, Piccoli’s Hollywood career did not take off.

In Europe, Piccoli won a host of accolades, including Best Actor at Cannes in 1980 for A Leap In The Dark by Marco Bellochio and a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982 for Strange Affair by Pierre Granier-Deferre.

The actors’ last major role was in Nanni Morettis We Have a Pope in 2011, which was presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Piccoli married three times: first to Eléonore Hirt, then to singer Juliette Gréco, until 1977, and to Ludivine Clerc, who survives him.