French Actor Trintignant Dies of Head Injuries

The French actor Marie Trintignant has died in Paris of wounds she suffered, seemingly during a row with her boyfriend, in a hotel in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Trintignant, who was 41, had been in an "irreversible" coma since Sunday. Lithuanian police say her boyfriend Bertrand Cantat, a well-known French rock star, is the prime suspect. He is under arrest in Vilnius and has been moved from prison to a secure hospital ward because of fears for his mental health.

Trintignant was a familiar face in French cinema and television drama, and the daughter of the venerable Jean-Louis Trintignant. She was perhaps best known to English-speaking audiences for her lead role in Claude Chabrol's 1992 film Betty.

Trintignant and Cantat were both admitted to hospital early on Monday morning, after a night when hotel staff reported "an awful lot of noise" coming from their suite. She was in a coma from which she never recovered after seemingly sustaining a blow to the head. He had drunk "dangerously high" amounts of alcohol, and taken prescription drugs. A doctor who examined him said his fist was badly bruised, though it was not clear whether Trintignant had been punched.

"It is most likely and logical that this case would now be qualified as murder, though not premeditated," Aivaras Raisutis, a Lithuanian criminal lawyer, told the Associated Press on Friday. If he is tried in Lithuania, the maximum sentence is 15 years. It is possible however that Lithuanian prosecutors will hand the case over to French police.

Trintignant's family have already filed a complaint against Cantat in a Parisian court, accusing him of grievous bodily harm and failure to help someone at risk.

In a court appearance in Vilnius on Thursday, Cantat said he was sorry about what had happened - but that it had been an accident, not a crime. "I ask for forgiveness from Nadine [Trintignant's mother] and her children," he said.

The French president Jacques Chirac expressed his condolences to Trintignant's family and his indignation at the "injustice of a destiny so brutally broken."