French actor and author Anne Wiazemsky, who was "best known for her appearances in films of the French Nouvelle Vague and marriage to director Jean-Luc Godard," but also published more than a dozen books, died October 5, the Guardian reported. She was 70. Wiazemsky made her film debut at age 18 in Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar. She met Godard a year later, appeared in his 1967 film La Chinoise, and they married during the film's production. Wiazemsky would appear in other Godard films, but they divorced in 1979.
Granddaughter of novelist and Nobel literature laureate François Mauriac, Wiazemsky wrote "quasi-novelistic texts from her own experience," Jonathan Romney noted in the Guardian. "She wrote two quizzical, dispassionate books about her relationship with Godard, Une Année Studieuse (A Studious Year, 2012) and Un An après (One Year Later, 2015), the latter substantially forming the basis of [the recent film] Redoubtable. It's only a shame that what's lost in [Michael] Hazanavicius's film is a sense of the inner experience--the exhilaration, the confusion, the exasperation--that Wiazemsky conveys so candidly in her honed, highly classical prose style."