Colette Marchand, a French ballerina whose long-legged glamour made her an international star in Roland Petit’s ballets in the 1940s and 1950s, and who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in John Huston’s “Moulin Rouge,” died on June 5 at her home in Bois-le-Roi, France. She was 90.

Laurent Bazire, a nephew, announced her death.

Ms. Marchand played a highly visible role in the postwar creative ferment of French ballet. Like many dancers in the Petit company, including Zizi Jeanmaire, its best-known star, she gave audiences a new image of the modern ballerina — part poetic, part chic. She was especially suited to Petit works that had a revue quality.

In 1949, in London and New York, she caused a sensation when she emerged from a giant egg in Petit’s “L’Oeuf à la Coque” (“The Boiled Egg”) as a chicken in black tights and black feathers. In the acrobatic mayhem onstage involving cooks and poultry in a kitchen (an updated Faustian hell, as the program defined it), Ms. Marchand’s showgirl presence was a standout. Some in the New York press called her “Les Legs,” and she later embarked on a music hall career.

But Ms. Marchand, a classically trained dancer, also excelled in Petit’s more lyrical works. He had created “Les Demoiselles de la Nuit” in 1948 for Margot Fonteyn, then a guest with his company, Les Ballets de Paris. Ms. Marchand succeeded her in the leading role of a cat who is a woman by night and falls into ill-fated love with a human.