[Deathwatch] Marie Trintignant, actress, 41

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Actress Trintignant Died from Blows, Autopsy Shows
Sun Aug 3, 7:41 AM ET
	
PARIS (Reuters) - An autopsy on French actress Marie Trintignant, who
died on Friday after five days in a coma, has confirmed her death was
caused by repeated blows to the head, a judicial official said on
Sunday.

Trintignant's family have already opened legal proceedings against her
boyfriend French rock star Bertrand Cantat, who was staying with the
actress in a hotel in Lithuania where she was making a film.

"She succumbed to a trauma from multiple blows to the face, which
caused cranial trauma, and blows to various other areas, which confirms
what doctors first concluded," an official at the Paris prosecutor's
office told Reuters.

Trintignant, 41, daughter of movie star Jean-Louis Trintignant and a
familiar face in French films since her childhood, died in a French
hospital a day after being flown back from Vilnius in a coma. Doctors
in Lithuania had performed two operations to try to save her.

The autopsy was carried out on Friday evening.

Cantat, lead singer in one of France's most popular bands, Noir Desir,
is behind bars in Lithuania after being placed under arrest on Thursday
for two weeks.

French investigators are due in Vilnius next week to try and
reconstruct a domestic drama that has shocked France.

But they will not have access to 39-year-old Cantat, who is in the
prison hospital due to his fragile psychological state.

Cantat is now implicated in an inquiry opened by the French prosecutor
into "voluntary violence that unintentionally caused death," equivalent
to him being formally investigated and meaning he can only be
questioned by the French judge assigned.

"He has told me 10 times this was an unhappy accident," his Lithuanian
lawyer, Virginijus Papirtis, told France Info radio on Saturday.

The French justice ministry said on Friday it was optimistic Cantat
could be extradited to France for a trial.

Trintignant was in Lithuania shooting a film about the life of the
French writer Colette, directed by her mother Nadine.

One of her best-remembered roles is that of a middle-class alcoholic in
Claude Chabrol's 1992 film "Betty."