PARIS • Michel Piccoli, one of the most original and versatile French actors of the last half century, has died aged 94, his family said on Monday.

He died "in the arms of his wife Ludivine and his children Inord and Missia after a stroke", said the family.

Piccoli - who died on Tuesday last week - starred in a string of classics which redefined world cinema, from director Luis Bunuel's Belle De Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972) to a memorable turn opposite actress Brigitte Bardot in director Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963).

Bardot, 85, said that though she and the left-wing Piccoli were polar opposites politically, they had shared great "mutual esteem". "He had humour and talent," she said.

A masterful performer with a wickedly malicious edge, Piccoli carved out a prolific career as both an art-house icon and a kind of French Cary Grant.

Like Grant and other Hollywood all-rounders such as Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, Piccoli was able to adapt himself to virtually any material without altering his essential everyman screen persona.

In a statement from the French presidency, President Emmanuel Macron called Piccoli a "giant" in the industry who, with "his immense power of metamorphosis", was "(one of) the most complete and most eclectic actors in French cinema".

"You did not direct Piccoli. You filmed him," said Mr Gilles Jacob, former head of the Cannes film festival, who led tributes to a man he described as "indispensable to France as water, sun and wind".

ACTOR AND ACTIVIST

With his bald forehead, vast eyebrows and sly grin, Piccoli hopped easily from seducer to cop to gangster to pope, with a predilection for ambiguous and cynical roles.

Despite his omnipresence, with Bunuel alone casting him in six films, Piccoli never won a French Oscar - the Cesar - despite being nominated four times, including for director Louis Malle's film Milou In May (1990) and director Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse in 1991.

He did, however, win Best Actor at Cannes in 1980 for playing a tortured Italian judge in director Marco Bellocchio's A Leap In The Dark.

The following year, he received the Best Actor award at the Berlin festival for Une Etrange Affaire (1981).

Piccoli was a lifelong activist and former communist who counted philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre among his friends. However, that did not stop him raging against repression in the old Eastern Bloc and supporting the Polish trade union, Solidarity.

Its struggle was one of a long list of causes Piccoli supported. As a teenager, he had witnessed Jews being rounded up in occupied Paris and he could not bear for people to say they did not know about the suffering of others.

One of his best known films outside France was director Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe (1973), in which a group of male friends shut themselves up in a house with prostitutes and try to eat themselves to death.

AGEING WELL

"I do not put on an act... I slip away behind my characters. To be an actor, you have to be flexible," Piccoli once said.

In a career spanning more than 150 films, he worked with some of cinema's greatest directors, including Jean Renoir, Alain Resnais, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Pierre Melville, Agnes Varda and Claude Sautet, as well as Bunuel, Godard and Malle.

Born into a family of musicians of Italian origin, his last major role was in director Nanni Moretti's We Have A Pope in 2011, where he played a pontiff crippled by panic attacks.

He was married three times, first to actress Eleonore Hirt, with whom he had a daughter; then for 11 years to singer Juliette Greco; and finally to writer Ludivine Clerc.

Right up to his late 80s, he never stopped acting, writing and directing, both for stage and screen.

"Age is very important for normal people," he told the French daily Liberation in 2000. "Let's try to be immortal - it is so much more fun."

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE