MARIA SCHNEIDER who set the world ablaze with MARLON BRANDO in Last Tango in Paris has died at 58.
Maria’s Talent agency Act 1 confirmed the gamin beauty’s passing "following a long illness", reportedly from cancer.
Schneider was just 19 when she starred opposite Brando in Bernarado Bertolucci‘s soft core parable about a young Parisian hottie who has a no-strings-attached affair with the hefty American in 1972.
A parallel plot depicted her BF Jean Pierre Leaud, a Jean Luc Goddard stand-in, directing her in a spoof of nouvelle vague cinema.
Schneider made two dozen films including the critically acclaimed existential opus The Passenger with Jack Nicholson for Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni and Memoirs of a French Whore.
After turning down a role in Caligula, Maria checked into a mental hospital.
"When I read Last Tango In Paris, I didn’t see anything that worried me," Maria said in an interview.
"I was 20. I didn’t want to be a star, much less a scandalous actress – simply to be in cinema.
"Later, I realized I’d been completely manipulated by Bertolucci and Brando."
