By Hillel Italie, AP News / Associated Press | Claudine Longet, the French singer and actor who was at the center of a highly publicized manslaughter trial after she was charged with the fatal shooting of her boyfriend, Olympic skier Vladimir “Spider” Sabich, has died at age 84.
Longet’s nephew, Bryan Longet, announced her death in a social media post on Thursday. “You have been a true inspiration in my life and you will always be,” he wrote. “Another star in the sky. Thank you for everything, my aunt.”
Reached by phone by The Associated Press, he confirmed Longet had died but did not reveal the cause of her death.
Longet was a native Parisian who had been acting since childhood. She appeared in numerous TV shows, recorded such hit albums as “Claudine” and was widely known for the bossa nova-style ballad “Nothing to Lose,” a highlight of the 1968 movie “The Party” that starred Longet and Peter Sellers.
At the time, she was married to singer Andy Williams, whom she had met in the early ‘60s while dancing in a Las Vegas revue. But by the mid-1970s, she and Williams were divorced and she was living near Aspen, Colorado, with Sabich, who had competed for the United States in the 1968 Olympics.
On March 21, 1976, a day that would long be scrutinized, she shot him at their home with a Luger pistol that she would contend he had been showing her and fired accidentally. Sabich, 31, died of a single shot to his abdomen; Longet had accompanied him in the ambulance to the hospital.
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Associated Press writer Samuel Petrequin in London contributed to this report.
Photo: Claudine Longet | From Patrick Welage’s Facebook page (no credit listed) https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10164449541994742&set=pcb.10164449565264742
