Stéphane Audran, who starred in 'Babette's Feast,' dies at 85

Audran’s son, actor Thomas Chabrol, told Agence France-Presse that his mother had been ill for some time and had died at home, but he did not give a location.

Although “Babette’s Feast” was her best-known movie internationally — it won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1988 — Audran by then had been famous for decades in France, most notably for her work in the films of the director Claude Chabrol, to whom she was married from 1964 to 1980.

Her first film with him, and her fourth overall, was “Les Cousins” in 1959, and many others followed, including “Les Biches” in 1968, “Just Before Nightfall” in 1971 and “Violette Nozière” in 1978.

Another career high point was Luis Buñuel’s comedy “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), another winner of the best foreign language film Oscar, in which she played one of a group of cultured guests at a dinner party that turns increasingly surreal.

Audran was born Colette Suzanne Dacheville in Versailles, France, on Nov. 8, 1932. Her father, a doctor, died when she was young, and she was raised by her mother.

In the early 1950s she took acting classes and was cast in several plays but did not have much success onstage. Her first film role was in 1957 in “Le Jeu de la Nuit” (“The Game of the Night”), but her career accelerated when Chabrol began casting her. In their almost two-dozen films, she often played a bourgeois woman.

Before her marriage to Chabrol, who died in 2010, Audran was married to Jean-Louis Trintignant; after their divorce she acted with him in several films, including “Les Biches” (“The Does”), with her new husband, Chabrol, directing. It was one of Audran’s most challenging roles. She played a bisexual woman named Frédérique.

“I like challenges,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1988, “and I like jumping into the unknown.”

She demonstrated that to a greater extent with the work she did with other directors. She played the mistress of Laurence Olivier’s character in the TV miniseries “Brideshead Revisited” in 1981. In the 1996 action film “Maximum Risk,” she played the mother of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character, who investigates his twin brother’s death.

In a career in which she covered the whole range of roles — drama, comedy, romance — she was best known for her turn in “Babette’s Feast,” based on a story by Isak Dinesen. Audran played the enigmatic title character, a sophisticated Frenchwoman who arrives unexpectedly in a remote Danish fishing village in the 1800s and shakes things up when she prepares a sumptuous, cosmopolitan meal for a group of its dour, upright inhabitants.

The movie was by the Danish director Gabriel Axel, who said casting the quintessentially French Audran, rather than a Danish star, was crucial.

“She opens a door differently from a Danish woman,” he said in a 1988 interview. “She even moves differently. Now this is very important. It wouldn’t have been the same with a Danish actress.”

Vincent Canby, reviewing the movie in The New York Times, wrote: “Miss Audran dominates the movie in the same way that Babette takes charge of the sisters’ household and the village. The actress is still one of the great natural resources of European films.”

Audran is survived by her son.

In a 1994 interview with The Chicago Tribune, Audran had an unusual description of how she begins to find a character.

“It starts with the clothes,” she said. “It is the first thing you have to think of. It’s helpful because, if you notice, the way you wear your clothes is the way you are.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.