"Last Tango in Paris" star Schneider dies

French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterand called Schneider "a great artist" and saluted her ability to convey ambiguity on the screen, at once seductive and enigmatic, when working with directors like Rene Clement and Bernardo Bertolucci.

"She remains the singular image of today's woman, one of those living conduits of female liberty who is eternally reconquering a new generation," he said in a statement.

Le Figaro newspaper quoted her family as saying she had died on Thursday morning in Paris after a long illness.

The daughter of French actor Daniel Gelin and a Parisian bookshop owner, Schneider was 19 when she was cast opposite Brando, who was 48.

Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris was controversial at the time of its release in 1972 for its sexual content, and Schneider later struggled with her image as a sex symbol, refusing to appear in a nude scene ever again.

In a 2007 interview with Britain's Daily Mail newspaper, she said the Italian director was "over-rated.

"He was fat and sweaty and very manipulative, both of Marlon and myself," she said.

"I was too young to know better. Marlon later said that he felt manipulated, and he was Marlon Brando, so you can imagine how I felt. People thought I was like the girl in the movie, but that wasn't me.

"I felt very sad because I was treated like a sex symbol - I wanted to be recognized as an actress and the whole scandal and aftermath of the film turned me a little crazy and I had a breakdown."

According to online biographies, Schneider struggled with drug abuse in the 1970s, but turned her life around with the help of a long-term partner. She deliberately did not say whether it was a man or a woman.

Although Schneider appeared opposite Jack Nicholson in "The Passenger" in 1975, her subsequent acting career consisted mostly of undistinguished, low-budget European films such as "Memoirs of a French Whore" (1979) and "Mama Dracula" (1980).

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White and Nick Vinocur, editing by Paul Casciato)