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).