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French actress Edith Scob, who starred in horror flick ‘Eyes Without a Face,’ dead at 81

Edith Scob attends the ceremony held to honour the French movies selected for the 69th Cannes Film Festival at the Ministry of Culture in Paris, France on April 28, 2016. (Marechal Aurore / Tribune News Service)
By Storm Gifford New York Daily News

Edith Scob, the French actress whose illustrious career in film and theater spanned nearly six decades, died Wednesday at the age of 81.

Her agent confirmed she died in Paris but did not reveal a cause of death, reported Agence France-Presse.

Scob shot to stardom in 1960, playing a disfigured car crash victim whose crazed surgeon father doggedly attempts to perform a face transplant on her in the classic horror film “Eyes Without a Face.”

Through much of the film only her eyes are visible, eerily peering out from behind bandages or a mask.

Scob also drew raves in a string of experimental films during the 1960s and ‘70s, portraying Joan of Arc in 1966’s “Jeanne au b 1/2cher” and the Virgin Mary in Luis Bunuel’s 1969 picaresque, philosophical drama “The Milky Way.”

In 2001, she appeared in “Brotherhood of the Wolf,” an 18th-century thriller about a feral beast slaughtering hundreds of residents in a French province. The film, which also starred Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel and Gaspard Ulliel – who starred as a younger Hannibal Lecter in the 2007 thriller “Hannibal Rising” – was an international box-office smash.

In the latter stages of her career, Scob was cast in prominent supporting roles. She snagged two Cesar Award nominations for her work in the 2008 family drama “Summer Hours” and four years later for her enigmatic role as a mysterious limousine driver in the contemporary classic “Holy Motors.”

One of her final movie roles was portraying Isabelle Huppert’s possessive mother in the critically acclaimed 2016 drama “Things to Come.”