French acting legend Michele Morgan dies at 96

French screen legend Michele Morgan, who starred in some 70 movies and took home the best actress prize at the first-ever Cannes film festival has died, her family said. She was 96. An icon of glamour, Morgan was remembered for a regal azure gaze, which she first turned on Jean Gabin as an 18-year-old ingenue in “Port of Shadows” (“Quai des Brumes”), a 1938 gangster movie. 

“You’ve got lovely eyes, you know,” he told her, forever sealing Morgan’s fate in French filmography as the “most beautiful pair of eyes in cinema”. “It bothers me to hear that repeated so often”, she was known to say much later – though she still gave her 1977 memoirs the title “With eyes like that...” 

 “Michele Morgan was more than just a gaze. She personified elegance and grace, and her legend left its mark on many generations,” French President Francois Hollande said in a statement. Morgan starred alongside Gabin, Jean Marais and Michel Simon, as well as Humphrey Bogart, and won Cannes award in 1946 for her role as a blind woman in “La Symphonie Pastorale”. Her career flourished in the 1940s to 1960s, and faded with the arrival of New Wave cinema.