Claudine Longet, a French singer and actor who made headlines in the 1970s when she killed her Olympian boyfriend in Colorado, has died at the age of 84.
Her 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, he confirmed that Longet had died, but did not reveal the cause of her death.
Longet was born in Paris and began acting as a child. She later recorded the hit album Claudine and was widely known for the bossa nova-style ballad “Nothing to Lose”, a highlight of the 1968 movie The Party which starred herself alongside Peter Sellers.
At the time, she was married to singer Andy Williams, whom she had met in the early 1960s while dancing in a Las Vegas revue.
However, by the mid-1970s, she and Williams were divorced and she was living near Aspen, Colorado, with Vladimir “Spider” Sabich, who had competed for the United States as a skier in the 1968 Olympics.
On 21 March 1976, 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.
Her trial in Aspen attracted worldwide attention. Williams was among those present, escorting her to and from the courthouse, paying for her legal fees and otherwise supporting his former wife and the mother of their three children.
“I thought it was unfair, I thought she was innocent, I thought it was an accident,” Williams told CBS This Morning in 2009.
Longet was charged with reckless manslaughter, but law enforcement officials made critical errors, like taking a blood sample from her without a warrant.
After four days of deliberation in January 1977, the jury found her guilty of negligent homicide. She was given two years’ probation, fined $250 and sentenced to 30 days in jail, eventually served on dates of her choosing.
Longet's career in entertainment was effectively over, and for a time she was the subject of mockery in popular culture, from a skit on Saturday Night Live to the Rolling Stones track “Claudine”, which featured a taunting refrain, “Claudine's back in jail again.” (The song was unreleased for decades).
Longet later married her defence attorney, Ron Austin, and lived with him in Aspen.
After Sabich's family filed a $1.3 million lawsuit in 1977 against her, the two sides reached a settlement that barred Longet from ever discussing Sabich or the trial.
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