Michèle Morgan, an elegant actress who escaped occupied France for Hollywood and went home to win the best actress award at the first Cannes Film Festival, in 1946, died on Tuesday in Meudon, France, just outside Paris. She was 96.

President François Hollande of France announced the death, calling Ms. Morgan “a legend who made her mark on numerous generations.”

The Nobel laureate André Gide once praised her “natural and strange grace.”

Ms. Morgan was just 26 but had already appeared in almost 20 European, British and American films when she starred as a young blind woman lusted after by a minister in Gide’s drama “Pastoral Symphony” (1946), directed by Jean Delannoy.

At the inaugural Cannes festival, a project dreamed up before World War II to compete with the Venice Film Festival, both she and the film won top prizes. Decades later, she presided over the awards jury at Cannes, which had become the world’s most prestigious film festival.