Michèle Morgan, the best actress award winner at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946, died on Tuesday in Meudon, France. She was 96.
Her best-known Hollywood film include the wartime adventure Passage to Marseille (1944), and Higher and Higher (1943), a musical comedy in which she starred opposite Frank Sinatra.
She was 26 when she won the Cannes award for her role in Pastoral Symphony (1946), directed by Jean Delannoy. Her final screen appearance was in La Rivale, a French television film in 1999.
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Morgan escaped to Hollywood when France was hit by war, and returned to France only after the war. She and Henri Vidal, an actor, (1950- 1959) and actor, director and screenwriter Gérard Oury (1960-2006). Her survivors include several grandchildren. Her son, Mike Marshall, died in 2005.
President of France, François Hollande, paid his tribute to Morgan, calling her “a legend who made her mark on numerous generations.”