Agnès Varda, the director best known as a key figure in the French New Wave and for a string of documentaries that culminated in an Oscar nomination for Faces Places in 2018, has died at the age of 90. The news was confirmed by Agence France Presse. Her family said in a statement: “The director and artist Agnès Varda died at her home on the night of Thursday, March 29, of complications from cancer. She was surrounded by her family and friends.”

Varda, who became the oldest ever Oscar nominee for Faces Places (alongside the photographer JR and her producer daughter, Rosalie), earned legions of new admirers after she sent a cardboard cutout to the Oscar nominees lunch. In the event, she lost out to the doping documentary Icarus, but it was a characteristic flourish from the film-maker.

Fellow film-makers paid tribute, including Out of Blue director Carol Morley, who wrote on social media: “We will always love you. You and your films will never be forgotten. Thank you for everything.” A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay also hailed her, writing: “Merci, Agnes. For your films. For your passion. For your light. It shines on.” In a statement, Martin Scorsese said: “What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching…and alive.” Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins wrote on social media: “Work and life were undeniably fused for this legend. She lived FULLY for every moment of those 90 damn years.”

Varda was born in Belgium in 1928, moving to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. Her initial plan was to become a photographer, and she gained a place at the elite École des Beaux-Arts. After working as a stills and stage photographer, Varda began making films in 1955 with La Pointe Courte, about a couple’s trip to Sète, the French town where she spent much of her own childhood. Starring Philippe Noiret, it would anticipate many of the concerns of the better known Nouvelle Vague films made in the subsequent few years.

She then made a string of short documentaries, before completing her next major feature in 1962: Cléo de 5 à 7, a “real-time” experimental study of a singer waiting to hear the results of a medical test. Cleo consolidated Varda’s position as the leading feminist of the French New Wave, and was followed by One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, which focused on two women’s contrasting experience of the feminist movement. Varda’s documentary work was also politicised, including two shorts about the Black Panthers in the late 60s.

Varda’s peripatetic career, switching between features and documentaries (and often combining both) continued: her 1985 feature Vagabond, starring Sandrine Bonnaire, was an unexpected commercial success in France and won the Golden Lion at Venice, as well as a César for best actress for Bonnaire. In 1991 Varda released Jacquot de Nantes, a moving docu-memoir about her husband, the director Jacques Demy, best known for films such as Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, who had died a year earlier.

Varda then began to concentrate on a distinctive form of highly personalised documentary essay, in which the subject matter often acted as a metaphor for the artistic process. The Gleaners and I, The Beaches of Agnès and Faces Places all won Varda increasing acclaim.

Varda was married once, to Demy, from 1962 to 1990. Their son, Mathieu, is a film-maker. Rosalie was the child of Varda’s earlier relationship with the director Antoine Bourseiller.