Claudine Longet, a French-born singer and actress who recorded a hit album of easy-listening music and starred opposite Peter Sellers onscreen, but drew even wider attention for fatally shooting her boyfriend, the Olympic skier Spider Sabich, has died. She was 84.
Her death was announced by Bryan Longet, a nephew, who provided no details about when or where she died.
A former Las Vegas showgirl, Ms. Longet was known for her dark good looks and sexy-whispery voice on albums including “Claudine”; for an early marriage to the “Moon River” crooner and TV variety show star Andy Williams; and, after the 1976 shooting, which set off tabloid headlines like bottle rockets, for being the subject of a tasteless skit on “Saturday Night Live.”
In the 1960s, she had guest roles on shows like “Hogan’s Heroes” and “Dr. Kildare,” often cast as a French-accented femme fatale. Her best-known performance was in the 1968 film comedy “The Party,” with Mr. Sellers.
She was also a regular on Mr. Williams’s televised Christmas specials. They separated amicably around 1969 and, a few years later, she moved into Mr. Sabich’s glass-and-stone A-frame in Aspen, Colo.
The April 1976 shooting and her subsequent trial on a manslaughter charge sucked in reporters and camera crews from around the world. They swarmed both because of Ms. Longet’s minor celebrity and because of the mystique of Aspen, a ski town then in transition to becoming a decadent playground of wealth and glamour.
Entertainers like Jack Nicholson and John Denver owned chalets in Aspen, and Newsweek called the resort the home of “rich recluses, hip hedonists, mellow cowboys and cocaine-snorting vegetarians.”
The California-born Mr. Sabich, 31, whose given name was Vladimir, was a popular local fixture of the slopes and bars, and was said to have been a model for Robert Redford’s dashing ski champion in the 1969 film “Downhill Racer.” He finished fifth in the slalom for the United States at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France.
He and Ms. Longet met at a ski event in California in 1972. Friends and acquaintances told reporters that, by the time of the shooting, their romance had soured.
Sentiment in Aspen favored the fallen ski champion, not the Hollywood interloper. Ms. Longet, then 34, faced a felony charge of reckless manslaughter, which carried a sentence of up to 10 years.
Appearing as her own star witness during the trial at the Pitkin County Courthouse in January 1977, she testified that she shot Mr. Sabich accidentally when a pistol he was showing her discharged. But a ballistics expert for the prosecution said the gun was fired from four to six feet from Mr. Sabich, who was in the bathroom, a scenario inconsistent with an accidental shooting.
Mr. Williams, who remained supportive of his former wife, accompanied Ms. Longet to the courthouse and squeezed her hand on the way inside. He also took the stand to deny testimony by a neighbor of Ms. Longet’s who said Mr. Williams had told him: “Claudine is a crazy chick. She likes to drive too fast, she skis too fast, she takes chances.”
Mistakes by local investigators led to some evidence, including Ms. Longet’s diary, being ruled inadmissible. The jury convicted Ms. Longet of negligent homicide, a lesser charge, and she was sentenced to 30 days in jail. She served much of it on weekends and was allowed to have meals sent in from a restaurant.
She faded from headlines, never releasing another record or appearing as a performer again.
For some, she lived on as the subject of a skit from the first season of “Saturday Night Live,” with Chevy Chase and Jane Curtin as sportscasters broadcasting “The Claudine Longet Invitational.” Skiers charge down a course before they are “accidentally” shot by Ms. Longet and cartwheel into wipeouts.
Ms. Longet’s lawyers threatened legal action, and “Saturday Night Live” issued an apology on a later show, read by the announcer Don Pardo. “It is desirable to correct any misunderstanding that a suggestion was made that, in fact, a crime had been committed,” the apology read. “The satire was fictitious and its intent only humorous.”
Claudine Georgette Longet was born in Paris on Jan. 29, 1942. Her mother was a physician, and her father manufactured X-ray equipment. While in her teens, she moved to Las Vegas to appear as a dancer in shows on the Strip. She met Mr. Williams in 1960, when he was performing at the Flamingo.
“She had straight dark hair, huge dark eyes and full lips, and moved with a dancer’s sensuous grace,” Mr. Williams wrote in a 2009 memoir, “Moon River and Me.” They married the next year.
The producer and Tijuana Brass leader Herb Alpert signed her to A&M Records, for which she recorded five albums, including her debut, “Claudine,” in 1967, which sold more than 500,000 copies and reached No. 11 on the Billboard pop chart. Its tracks included covers of the bossa nova hit “Meditation” and the Beatles tune “Here, There and Everywhere.”
Her most notable film role was in “The Party,” directed by Blake Edwards. She played an innocent starlet who finds an ideal match in another Hollywood outsider: Mr. Sellers’s overly polite and clumsy Indian actor, who proceeds to sabotage a film producer’s soiree.
During her marriage to Mr. Williams, the couple became friends with Senator Robert F. Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, spending time together on vacations in Sun Valley, Idaho, and at Kennedy family homes on Cape Cod and in Virginia.
When Mr. Kennedy sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, he stayed in an apartment over Mr. Williams’s garage in Malibu while he campaigned in the California primary. The Williamses were in Mr. Kennedy’s suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when the candidate was shot there that June, shortly after clinching the primary. They sat vigil at the hospital where Mr. Kennedy died.
Mr. Williams and Ms. Longet had three children, Noelle, Christian and Bobby — who was born in 1969 and named for Mr. Kennedy. Details about Ms. Longet’s survivors were not immediately available.
She later married her defense lawyer from the trial, Ronald Austin, and they lived for many years in Aspen.
“Given the continuing hostility to her in Aspen,” Mr. Williams wrote in his memoir, “I felt that Claudine showed enormous courage in resolving to continue living in the town and face down those mounting a whispering campaign against her.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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