Marie Laforêt, French actress and singer, dies at 80

Marie Laforêt, the French actress and singer known in Europe as “the girl with the golden eyes” (“la fille aux yeux d’or”), died on Saturday in Genolier, Switzerland, a small town in the Nyon district north of Geneva. She was 80.

The death was announced in a statement from her family.

Laforêt appeared in about 35 feature films, as well as numerous television movies and miniseries, but her music career was even more successful than her work onscreen. She sold more than 35 million records, counting among her biggest hits “Vendanges l’Amour,” “Ivan, Boris et Moi,” “Viens, Viens” and “Il A Neigé sur Yesterday” (“It Has Snowed on Yesterday”), a 1977 tribute to the Beatles. Her songs were strongly influenced by folk music, and she even recorded versions of American folk songs, including “House of the Rising Sun.”

She came from “a bourgeois milieu” and a family that was passionate about music, she said in a 2008 interview with the French newsmagazine VSD ( Vendredi Samedi Dimanche). “The tea was brought on a silver platter at 5 p.m.,” she recalled, adding: “My parents used the formal address ‘ vous.’ My mother changed for dinner.”

But her early years included considerable trauma.

Maïtène Marie Brigitte Doumenach was born on Oct. 5, 1939, in Soulac-surMer, France, a seaside resort town north of Bordeaux. Her parents, Jean Doumenach, a manufacturer, and Marie-Louise (Saint Guily) Doumenach, had one other daughter.

At 3, Maïtène suddenly stopped speaking. More than three decades later, Laforêt revealed publicly that she had been raped by a neighbor that year, more than once, while her father was in a German prisoner- of-war camp. She was deeply affected for decades, and it was suggested in various articles that she later turned to acting because it offered catharsis. She agreed.

At the end of World War II, Maïtène’s father returned and the family moved, first to Valenciennes, in the North of France, and then to Paris. She attended Lycée Jean de La Fontaine, in the wealthy 16th arrondissement, where she became interested in drama.