Emmanuelle Riva, Oscar-nominated Star of ‘Amour,’ Dies at 89

Emmanuelle Riva — the legendary French actress who received an Oscar nomination for her role in 2013’s Amour — has died, her agent said. She was 89.

Anne Alvares Correa told the Associate Press that Riva died Friday in a Paris clinic after battling a long illness.

Throughout the course of her six-decade career, Riva appeared in over 70 features. She scored her first lead role in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour — which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959. She worked with acclaimed directors like Jean-Pierre Melville, Gillo Pontecorvo, Marco Bellocchio, Philippe Garrel, Francois Mauriac, and Krzysztof Kieslowski — playing an Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother to Juliette Binoche’s daughter in the latter’s 1993 feature Three Colors: Blue.

She also had extensive stage and television credits, and was an published poet and photographer.

Riva’s next film is Paris Pieds Nuts, which is being released abroad in March. The actress filmed scenes in Iceland last year for an feature called Alma, which will is still being shot and edited. Correa told the AP that picture would be her last.

To American audiences, Riva is best know for her role in Michael Haneke’s Amour — a film about an elderly man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) struggling to let go of his long-loving wife (Riva) after her stroke.

The role won her the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, 54 years after she first made her premiere there. The film would get her name listed in the Oscar history books, as she became the oldest actress ever to be nominated for Best Actress.

In a statement reported by The Hollywood Reporter, French President Francois Hollande payed tribute to Riva, saying she “deeply marked French cinema” and “created intense emotion in all the roles she played.”