Paris: French film legend Agnes Varda, the only woman director to emerge from the New Wave scene in the 1960s, has died aged 90 after a battle with cancer, her family said on Friday.
With her two-tone bowl haircut, Varda was seen as the arty, eccentric “grandmother” of French cinema and tributes poured in for the highly political artist who was revered for her originality.
Varda died overnight at home “of complications from cancer. She was surrounded by her family and friends,” the family said in a statement.
Varda worked right up to the end of her life, with a new autobiographical documentary premiering at the Berlin film festival just last month. She was still giving media interviews last weekend at an exhibition of her artworks.
“She was so far ahead of everyone else; she was the first to make films that influenced the New Wave,” fellow French director Claude Lelouch said on Friday. “She always chose the right battles.”
French Culture Minister Frank Riester said on Twitter: “Devastated, overwhelmed, saddened: these emotions accompany the certitude that we have lost one of the greatest artists of our age.”
Last November, Varda won an honorary Oscar at age 89 for her documentary “Faces Places”, which saw her ditch her walking stick during the ceremony for an impromptu celebratory dance with Hollywood star Angelina Jolie. With her eyesight failing but imagination undimmed, Varda admits at one point during the film that “every new person I meet feels like my last one.”
Her death came just before she was to inaugurate a show of her whimsical art installations at the Chaumont-sur-Loire castle in the central Loire valley of France on Saturday.
Varda and her late husband, director Jacques Demy, were one of the New Wave’s great double acts, with her pitching in on his masterpieces like “The Young Girls of Rochefort”, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Bay of Angels”.
She made her name in 1962 with her first feature “Cleo de 5 a 7” (Cleo from 5 to 7), about a hypochondriac singer who gets increasingly worried that she has cancer while she is waiting for test results from her doctor.
But it was in her documentaries and films that mixed real-life events with fiction that Varda weaved her very particular brand of gritty poetry.
She won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival and a host of other awards for her 1985 film “Vagabond”, which retraced the life of a homeless woman who was found frozen to death in a ditch.
Her social conscience was also clear in her now classic documentary, “The Gleaners & I” (2000) — about people who comb the fields after the harvest for leftover grain and fruit, and urban gleaners who make a living from junk.— AFP
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