Mireille Darc

Willowy French actress who starred in Godard’s Weekend

MIREILLE DARC, who has died aged 79, was a French model turned actress who became a sex symbol in her heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.

Willowy, and with a sleek blonde bob, Darc was known to her fans as “the grasshopper” on account of her uncannily long and slender legs. Her figure was shown to sensational effect in Yves Robert’s 1972 comedy The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe, in which her character is seen greeting the comedian Pierre Richard at the front door of her flat in a demure high-necked black velvet dress, only to turn round to reveal that the dress is backless, cut rather too low for modesty to be maintained.

She also collaborated with Georges Lautner, Jean-luc Godard, Edouard Molinaro, Jacques Deray, Roger Vadim, Alain Delon (whose partner she became) and Michel Audiard, starring in more than 50 films.

The best known of these was probably Godard’s Weekend (1967), a film noir turned dystopian Marxist surreal fantasy, in which she and Jean Yarre played a disaffected middle-class couple who head to the countryside with the hope of finally finishing off her father, a miserly property magnate, but become involved in a paralysing traffic jam, populated by bizarre characters and punctuated by violent car accidents, before eventually falling into the hands of a group of cannibalistic hippie revolutionaries.

She was born Mireille Christiane Gabrielle Aimée Aigroz in Toulon on May 15 1938, later taking the surname Darc as a tribute to the French warrior-saint Joan of Arc. After attending the Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Toulon, she moved to Paris.

She landed her first film role in Claude Barma’s La Grande Brétèche (1960) and her first leading role the Known as ‘the grasshopper’ following year in Jean Prat’s Hauteclaire.

It was Georges Lautner who helped launch her career as one of France’s biggest sex symbols, as she graduated from decorative roles in his crime comedies like NE nous fâchons pas (“Let’s Not Get Angry”, 1966) to sexually charged performances in Galia (1966), La Grande Sauterelle (1967) and Les Seins De Glace (“Icy Breasts”, 1974). Michel Audiard directed her in the comedy Elle boit pas, elle fume pas, elle drague pas, mais... elle cause! (1970).

She met Alain Delon in 1968, on the set of Jean Herman’s crime caper Jeff (1969), and went on to appear with him in several more films. They began a relationship which lasted some 15 years during which they spent time in their home in the French countryside or in Marrakesh. They broke up in the early 1980s but remained friends, appearing together on stage in Paris in a 2007 production of The Bridges Of Madison County.

Darc had suffered from a heart murmur from childhood and in 1980 she underwent open heart surgery. Three years later she was badly injured when the car in which she was travelling collided with a truck, and spent three months in hospital recovering from head and spleen injuries.

She abandoned her film career but returned to television in the 1990s, and in later life made documentaries on social issues such as prostitution and homeless women. But she continued to suffer from health problems.

In 2006 Darc was appointed to the Légion d’honneur by President Jacques Chirac.

She is survived by her husband, Pascal Desprez.

Mireille Darc, born May 15 1938, died August 28 2017