Movie Actress Dies of Lung Disease: Christine Boisson Was 68

Christine Boisson, the French actress who started her career at 17 with her role in Emmanuelle, has died. Her daughter confirmed her passing in Paris, noting she passed in a nursing home and had been treating lung disease. She was 68.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @le_film_d_ariane

Boisson’s breakout role as Marie-Ange follows her meeting the title character in Bangkok amid her “erotic film” adventure. The film was released in 1974 and became a box office success in France, sparking many sequels and remakes since.

She later moved away from the erotic roles, according to the New York Times, making her dramatic film debut in Identification of a Woman from Michelangelo Antonioni. She was awarded the Prix Romy Schneider in 1984 and made the jump to English-language movies in 2002 with The Truth About Charlie, a remake of Charade by director Jonathan Demme, starring Carey Grant and Audrey Hepburn.

She was also an established stage actor, appearing in Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes in 1998 and Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull in 1977. All of it plays into her professional goal of avoiding typecasting across her four decades in the industry. “I didn’t want to be clichéd at all,” she once said, according to the NYT.

“The time she grew up in that business was the time of a lot of misogyny,” her daughter Juliette Kowski said to the outlet. “[She] was not a puppet. People didn’t always get along with her, because she was too strong almost.”