Michel Piccoli, one of the most original and versatile French actors of the last half century, has died aged 94, his family said Monday. He died "in the arms of his wife Ludivine and his children Inord and Missia after a stroke", the family told AFP.

Piccoli - who passed on May 12 - starred in a string of classics which redefined world cinema, from Luis Bunuel's "Belle de Jour" and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" to a typically memorable turn opposite Brigitte Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt" in 1963.

A masterful performer with a wickedly malicious edge, Piccoli managed to carve out a hugely prolific career as both an arthouse icon and a kind of French Cary Grant.

Like Grant and other Hollywood all-rounders Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, Piccoli was able to adapt himself to virtually any material without altering his essential everyman screen persona.

He did, however, win best actor at Cannes in 1980 for playing a tortured Italian judge in Marco Bellocchio's "A Leap in the Dark" and the following year shared best actor at Berlin for "Une etrange affaire".

Piccoli was a life-long activist and former communist who counted the philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre among his friends, but that did not stop him raging against repression in the old Eastern Bloc and supporting the Polish trade union, Solidarity.