In a prolific and versatile career of nearly 100 films, the French actor Nathalie Baye, who has died aged 77, was recognised for her ability to adapt to any part she chose to play. Her many and varied roles included an alcoholic police officer, a prostitute, a beautician, wrestler, supermarket cashier, telephone operator and, more recently, a marchioness in the second Downton Abbey film, as well as a cameo role in the hit French television series Dix pour Cent.

Discovered in the 1970s by the New Wave director François Truffaut, then cast by Jean-Luc Godard and, later, Steven Spielberg in his 2002 film Catch Me If You Can (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks), Baye worked with some of cinema’s most recognised and respected figures.

It was not just the quantity of her roles but the quality of her performances that earned her accolades. Baye won four César awards, the French equivalent of an Oscar, two of them for best actress. Three of them, for Every Man for Himself (1980), Strange Affair (1981) and La Balance (1982), were won in successive years.

Her big break came when Truffaut cast her first in his 1973 comedy La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night), then five years later as the lead role opposite himself in the historical drama La Chambre Verte (The Green Room, 1978) based on Henry James’s short story The Altar of the Dead, first published in his collection Terminations in 1895.

She later recalled that Truffaut was so anxious about whether his own acting performance was good enough that he almost scrapped the project. “If François asked me to perform with him, it was because he knew I wasn’t the kind of actress who caused problems,” she said. “He could rely on me, which was very reassuring to him.”

Shortly afterwards Godard cast Baye in his 1980 film Sauve Qui Peut (Every Man for Himself), for which she won her first César for best supporting actress. By the early 80s she had worked with all of France’s best known directors, including Truffaut, Godard, Claude Chabrol and Bertrand Blier, as well as most of its biggest stars, including Gérard Depardieu, Alain Delon and Johnny Hallyday.

Baye’s subsequent romantic relationship with Hallyday, whom she had met on the set of a television comedy show, made them one of the golden couples of the 80s. Baye was credited with taming Hallyday – real name Jean-Philippe Smet – by dragging him away from a hard-drinking, clubbing lifestyle and persuading him to settle down in the Paris banlieue. The couple had a daughter, Laura Smet, Baye’s only child, and although the relationship foundered after four years they remained friends until Hallyday’s death in 2017.

One of Baye’s more recent appearances was playing herself with daughter Laura, in a cameo role in Dix pour Cent, shown on TV as Call My Agent in the UK, in 2015. She starred in a further 13 films after that, the last in 2023.

The French president Emmanuel Macron was among many to pay tribute to Baye. “We loved Nathalie Baye so much … with her voice, her smile and her grace, she has been a constant presence in French cinema over the past few decades,” he said, adding that she was “an actress with whom we have loved, dreamed and grown up”.

Born in Mainneville in the Eure region of Normandy, Nathalie was the only child of Denise (nee Coustet) and Claude Baye, who were artists. The couple were poor bohemians who, according to Nathalie, spent their lives “in a perpetual state of adolescent crisis”, a circumstance that had negative effects on her upbringing.

“I was brought up to worship nothing,” she said. “I had to rebuild myself from the ruins of my parents’ breakdown. They were funny, but they were suffering … my father paid me a single compliment; my mother never did.”

Despite their apparently modest means, her parents, having moved to Paris when Baye was young, succeeded in enrolling her into the elite École Alsacienne. However, she struggled there with dyslexia and dyscalculia, and left at 14 to sign up for dance classes.

“Dance saved me from school, where I was unhappy,” she said. “That’s a good reason, isn’t it? I was dyslexic; I used to mix up ‘m’s and ‘n’s, ‘b’s and ‘p’s. I got a lot of things mixed up. Above all, my mind was elsewhere.” Dance, she said, “taught me discipline and rigour.”

At 17, partly to escape her quarrelling parents, who eventually separated, Baye went to New York to study at a dance school and to improve her English while working as an au pair.

On her return to France a year and a half later, René Simon, founder of the Cours Simon drama school in Paris, waived his fees so that she could study there, after which she went on to the Conservatory for Dramatic Arts.

She graduated second in her class at the Conservatory, and then landed a minor role in the 1973 movie Two People, directed by the American film-maker Robert Wise, who had won a best director Oscar for the 1961 musical West Side Story. Shortly afterwards she was taken up by Truffaut.

Baye said she chose roles not for recognition or money but because she liked a script. Nonetheless, in 2007 she was listed as the eighth most highly paid cinema celebrity in France. “She could play any role, without ever overdoing it: fragility as well as strength, silence as well as fury,” said the director Gérald-Brice Viret, who described her acting as “intelligent, understated, deeply embodied”.

Baye remained deeply loyal to Depardieu, her co-star in six films – the first La Dernière Femme (The Last Woman) in 1976 and the last Je N’ai Rien Oublié in 2010; they also appeared together in the 1982 film Le Retour de Martin Guerre (The Return of Martin Guerre).

In 2023 she publicly supported the actor, who was facing charges of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment, describing the accusations as a witch-hunt. “He may use bad language, but I know that he is not at all the man who is being portrayed in such a monstrous light in the ridiculous tabloid press,” she said.

She is survived by her daughter and a grandson, Léo.

• Nathalie Marie Andrée Baye, actor, born 6 July 1948; died 17 April 2026

• This article was amended on 20 April 2026. Owing to an editing error, an earlier version said that René Simon led the Conservatory for Dramatic Arts in Paris; in fact, he ran his own school, the Cours Simon.