Born into a cinematic clan at the heart of French film-making, Marie Trintignant, who has died aged 41 after a skull fracture, was one of France's most recognisable and most singular performers. She was known for her portrayal of marginal women and tragic figures, of prostitutes and thieves, alcoholics and liars, women who fail to master their own, strong emotions and their lives.
She didn't like secure roles, she declared, she loved monsters, speaking "for those who don't deserve being spoken for". With her delicately etched face, her dark eyes and heavy eyebrows, and the air of recklessness and femininity that emanated from her performances, she quickly established herself as one of France's most important young character actors who was equally strong in comedy and tragedy.
She grew up in an atmosphere saturated by acting and film-making and appeared in her first role at the age of four in the film Mon Amour, Mon Amour (1967). This was directed by her mother, the director and feminist activist Nadine Trintignant. Her father was the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, who became famous in 1956 opposite Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu Créa la Femme (And God Created Woman).
Despite early successes, Marie meanwhile dreamt of becoming a veterinarian. "The advantage of having parents like mine is that one immediately sees the other side of the business," she commented. A sensitive child, she was at the same time attracted and repelled by a life spent dramatising the tumultuous emotions she witnessed in her parents' marriage.
When her younger sister died at nine, Marie became so withdrawn that she seemed to have lost the power of speech altogether, and throughout her early career she was afflicted by an almost pathological timidity. But by her mid-teens she had resolved to go into acting.
She had already made five films before appearing with Patrick Dewaere in her first critical success, Série Noire (1979) at the age of 17. The next milestone in her career was with the Claude Chabrol in his Une Affaire de Femmes (The Story Of Women, 1988) in which she played a young prostitute, Lulu, in wartime Vichy France. The collaboration with Chabrol, she recalled, was of great importance. "Until then I had always felt that I was a fraud if I did not go to extremes in showing my characters' pain," she remembered later, "but he taught me lightness. He showed me how to grow without false tragedy."
Despite her narrow survival after a serious car accident in 1990, Trintignant hardly allowed the pace of her work to slacken off and during the next decade starred in 21 films, among them Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers On The Bridge, 1991), Betty (1992, again with Chabrol) and Cible Émouvante (Wild Target, 1993) with Jean Rochefort and Guillaume Depardieu.
Trintignant's private life moved as fast as her professional one. Living at some kilometers' distance from her parents, close to Uzès in the south of France, she had four sons from three fathers, Richard Kolinka, the drummer of the popular rock band Téléphone, the actor François Cluzet and the author and director Samuel Benchetrit, who also directed Marie and her father Jean-Louis on the Paris stage. Her life, she said was made of "pieces of lives". Indeed, her existence seemed to reflect her art.
In television dramas directed by her mother Nadine, she developed stronger and more emotionally secure characters. But she continued to play appealing emotional misfits and liars, especially in Les Apprentis (The Apprentices, 1995), opposite her husband François Cluzet, and in Comme Elle Respire (White Lies, 1998), again with Guillaume Depardieu.
Trintignant was in Vilnius at the time of her death, shooting her latest film, based on the life of the writer Collette, directed by her mother. She was staying in a hotel together with her boyfriend of some months, the rock musician Bertrand Cantat, of the group Noir Desir with whom she had lived together in Paris while remaining married to Cluzet.
Four days before filming was scheduled to finish, the couple quarreled in their hotel room. Cantat, currently under arrest in Vilnius, maintained that Trintignant had accidentally fallen backwards against a wall and cracked her skull. When the ambulance was finally called, the heavily intoxicated Cantat was taken into custody.
She was brought back to Paris. "If she really is to die, I want her to die in France," her mother told the press. Marie leaves her husband and four sons.
· Marie Trintignant, actor, born January 21 1962; died August 1 2003.