Claude Jade, 1948 - 2006.

Claude Jade, 58, the French actress who starred in several of director François Truffaut's best-loved films, died Friday at a hospital in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, said Jacques Rampal, a playwright she had recently worked with.

The Los Angeles Times.

[W]ith the exception of her supporting turn in Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz (1969) - which, by unfortunate coincidence, also featured the recently deceased Philippe Noiret - nothing else on her resume had an impact comparable to her enduringly affecting portrayal of the woman Antoine Doinel loved and lost. She was magical. And because she remains immortal on film, she is magical.

Joe Leydon.

See also: the Wikipedia entry; and in French, Le Figaro and Libération.

Updated.

Memorable scenes pass through the mind like a montage: her teaching Antoine the best way to butter toast in the morning, their writing each other little notes, his calling her "my little mother, my little sister, my little daughter" in a taxi, and she replying she would rather be his wife; her attempts to guess Antoine's latest job, amusingly suggesting cab driver or water taster, her reaction when Antoine hangs a scissors on her ring finger, his affectionate response to her wearing glasses in bed, the medium tracking shot of her legs as she stops at a shop for tangerines then heads up the stairs, as one of the neighborhood men longingly admires them.

Ronald Bergan for the Guardian.

Posted by dwhudson at December 5, 2006 3:21 AM