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.<\/p>\n
Her death was announced by Bryan Longet, a nephew, who provided no details about when or where she died.<\/p>\n
A former Las Vegas showgirl, Ms. Longet was known for her dark good looks and sexy-whispery voice on albums including \u201cClaudine\u201d<\/a>; for an early marriage to the \u201cMoon River\u201d crooner and TV variety show star Andy Williams<\/a>; and, after the 1976 shooting, which set off tabloid headlines like bottle rockets, for being the subject of a tasteless skit on \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201d<\/p>\n In the 1960s, she had guest roles on shows like \u201cHogan\u2019s Heroes\u201d and \u201cDr. Kildare,\u201d often cast as a French-accented femme fatale. Her best-known performance was in the 1968 film comedy \u201cThe Party,\u201d with Mr. Sellers.<\/p>\n She was also a regular on Mr. Williams\u2019s televised Christmas specials. They separated amicably around 1969 and, a few years later, she moved into Mr. Sabich\u2019s glass-and-stone A-frame in Aspen, Colo.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s minor celebrity and because of the mystique of Aspen, a ski town then in transition to becoming a decadent playground of wealth and glamour.<\/p>\n Entertainers like Jack Nicholson and John Denver owned chalets in Aspen, and Newsweek called the resort the home of \u201crich recluses, hip hedonists, mellow cowboys and cocaine-snorting vegetarians.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s dashing ski champion in the 1969 film \u201cDownhill Racer.\u201d He finished fifth in the slalom for the United States at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s who said Mr. Williams had told him: \u201cClaudine is a crazy chick. She likes to drive too fast, she skis too fast, she takes chances.\u201d<\/p>\n Mistakes by local investigators led to some evidence, including Ms. Longet\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n She faded from headlines, never releasing another record or appearing as a performer again.<\/p>\n For some, she lived on as the subject of a skit from the first season of \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d with Chevy Chase and Jane Curtin as sportscasters broadcasting \u201cThe Claudine Longet Invitational.\u201d Skiers charge down a course before they are \u201caccidentally\u201d shot by Ms. Longet and cartwheel into wipeouts.<\/p>\n Ms. Longet\u2019s lawyers threatened legal action, and \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d issued an apology on a later show, read by the announcer Don Pardo. \u201cIt is desirable to correct any misunderstanding that a suggestion was made that, in fact, a crime had been committed,\u201d the apology read. \u201cThe satire was fictitious and its intent only humorous.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cShe had straight dark hair, huge dark eyes and full lips, and moved with a dancer\u2019s sensuous grace,\u201d Mr. Williams wrote in a 2009 memoir, \u201cMoon River and Me.\u201d They married the next year.<\/p>\n The producer and Tijuana Brass leader Herb Alpert signed her to A&M Records, for which she recorded five albums, including her debut, \u201cClaudine,\u201d 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 \u201cMeditation\u201d<\/a> and the Beatles tune \u201cHere, There and Everywhere.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Her most notable film role was in \u201cThe Party,\u201d<\/a> directed by Blake Edwards<\/a>. She played an innocent starlet who finds an ideal match in another Hollywood outsider \u2014 Mr. Sellers\u2019s overly polite and clumsy Indian actor, who proceeds to sabotage a film producer\u2019s soiree.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n When Mr. Kennedy sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, he stayed in an apartment over Mr. Williams\u2019s garage in Malibu while he campaigned in the California primary. The Williamses were in Mr. Kennedy\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Mr. Williams and Ms. Longet had three children, Noelle, Christian and Bobby \u2014 who was born in 1969 and named for Mr. Kennedy. Details about Ms. Longet\u2019s survivors were not immediately available.<\/p>\n She later married her defense lawyer from the trial, Ronald Austin, and they lived for many years in Aspen.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven the continuing hostility to her in Aspen,\u201d Mr. Williams wrote in his memoir, \u201cI felt that Claudine showed enormous courage in resolving to continue living in the town and face down those mounting a whispering campaign against her.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Claudine Longet, a French-born singer and actress who recorded a hit album of easy-listening music and starred opposite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":645798,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[259952,278671,236,278084,175677,88,278669,206,263538,278083,278670,5352],"class_list":["post-645797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-actors-and-actresses","tag-andy-1927-2012","tag-celebrities","tag-claudine","tag-deaths-obituaries","tag-entertainment","tag-longet","tag-movies","tag-pop-and-rock-music","tag-sabich","tag-spider-1945-76","tag-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645797\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}