Anne Wiazemsky, film star, author and wife of Godard, dies at 70

PARIS (AP) — Anne Wiazemsky, a French novelist and New Wave actress who appeared in seven films directed by her husband, JeanLuc Godard, died on Thursday in Paris. She was 70.

The cause was cancer, her French book publisher, Éditions Gallimard, said.

Ms. Wiazemsky, a granddaughter of the Nobel literature laureate François Mauriac, was a leading lady in Godard films as well as Mr. Godard’s wife, a sometime muse and later a chronicler of his pioneering role in the New Wave, which swept France in the 1960s, fueled by the revolutionary stirrings that culminated in volatile strikes and demonstrations in 1968.

She became an instant star in 1966 when she was barely 18 after a family friend, the actress Florence Delay, introduced her to the director Robert Bresson. He immediately cast her in his film “Au Hasard Balthazar.”

In that film, Ms. Wiazemsky played a young woman living in the country who is being courted by an evil suitor while sharing her affection with a pet donkey named Balthazar, which doubles as a symbolic martyr. Bresson’s “range of associations in symbol and dogma should occupy any amateur of Christian theology for some time,” Roger Greenspun wrote in The New York Times.

Not yet 20, she met Mr. Godard, who was about 17 years her senior, while starring in his film “La Chinoise”; they married during its production. It was his second marriage.

Ms. Wiazemsky was born on May 14, 1947, in Berlin to Yvan Wiazemsky and Claire Mauriac.