Claire Maurier, a French actress whose long career included film roles that brought her international attention, including the self-centered mother in the New Wave classic “The 400 Blows” and a bistro owner in the quirky hit “Amélie,” died on May 3 in France. She was 97.
Her death was widely reported in the French media, citing her husband, Jean-Renaud Garcia. The reports did not say where in France she died.
Ms. Maurier already had a steady career in theater and movies, often in supporting roles, when François Truffaut cast her in “The 400 Blows” (1959), his first feature film.
Regarded as one of the earliest and finest examples of the iconoclastic spirit of New Wave filmmaking, Mr. Truffaut’s movie was hailed from the start as a major step forward in cinema.
Writing in The New York Times, the critic Bosley Crowther called “The 400 Blows” a “masterpiece” for its unflinching, unsentimental yet sympathetic depiction of a troubled schoolboy (played by 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud) and the narcissistic adults in his life. A perpetual truant, rebellious and increasingly alienated, he eventually runs away from home and turns to petty crime to survive.
Ms. Maurier played the wayward boy’s mother, a woman who cheats on her dull husband and is exasperated with her son. Blinded by her own vanity — she is often looking at herself in the mirror — she cannot quite reach him emotionally.
“I was your age once, too, you know,” she says to the boy, turning the conversation back to herself. “You kids always forget that.”
Working with Mr. Truffaut was not easy, Ms. Maurier recalled. “A charming character,” she described him to Le Figaro in 2010, “but demanding and anxious, so great was his search for perfection.”
She made dozens of films, several of them distributed in the United States. They included “La Cuisine au Beurre” (1963), in which she played a bigamist opposite the French comedy stars Fernandel and Bourvil; “La Cage Aux Folles” (1978), as a conservative politician’s wife with a secret past; and “Amélie” (2001), a whimsical romantic comedy-drama that became one of the highest-grossing French films ever released in the United States. (Ms. Maurier plays the owner of the bistro where Audrey Tautou’s Amélie Poulin works as a waitress.)
Besides her husband, an actor, information about her survivors was not immediately available.
Odette Michelle Suzanne Agramon was born on March 27, 1929, in Céret, a town in the French Pyrenees. Her family moved frequently because her father, André Agramon, went from city to city refurbishing performance halls.
Acting intrigued her early on and, while in grade school, she and classmates staged a production of “Cinderella.” At 16, she entered the Bordeaux Conservatory. Within a few years, having taken the name Claire Maurier, she began appearing in films and onstage in Paris and Brussels.
One of her earliest stage roles, in 1954, was in “Lysistrata,” the Aristophanes comedy. Later she had roles in French productions of Tennessee Williams’s “Sweet Bird of Youth” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
Ms. Maurier also worked frequently on French television, most recently in 2013 in the series “La Famille Katz,” about a dysfunctional family.
In the mordant 1996 comedy of family grudges “Un Air de Famille” — released in the United States as “Family Resemblances” — she played a domineering and conniving widowed matriarch.
Her performance had such bullying panache that Bob Hicks, a critic for The Oregonian, described her as “Bette Davis-brittle” and “perfect — that is, perfectly horrible.”
Charlotte Dulany contributed reporting.
