NEW YORK, NY.- Yvonne Furneaux, a French-born English actress known for her icy beauty and Continental air who brought jet-setting panache to critically acclaimed films including Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” and Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion,” died July 5 at her home in North Hampton, New Hampshire. She was 98.

Her son, Nicholas Natteau, said the cause was complications of a stroke.

Furneaux, an Oxford University graduate who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, got her start on the British stage, including in productions of “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Macbeth.”

Despite her credentials, however, she was often singled out more for her fashion model looks than for her acting prowess.

In a review of a 1955 production of Jean Giraudoux’s “Ondine,” British theater critic Kenneth Tynan wrote Furneaux off as a “buxom temptress” who was “more impressive in silhouette than in action.” The Daily News of New York described her in a 1958 headline as an “English peach.”

Accordingly, after she made the transition to film, she was often cast as a siren or a damsel in distress in period adventure movies, including two starring Errol Flynn.

She earned a degree of praise, though, for dual roles in the British horror film “The Mummy” (1959), starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. She played both a 4,000-year-old dead princess as well as the wife of a late-19th-century archaeologist. Australian writer and film critic John Baxter noted her “considerable ability to cringe, flinch and moan.”

Furneaux finally earned critical validation the following year with a key role in “La Dolce Vita,” which tied for No. 35 on the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound directors’ poll on the 100 greatest films of all time.

The film, which brought Fellini worldwide fame and Furneaux global attention, was a shimmering and sinister exploration of the decadence of Rome’s glamour set, as seen through the eyes of a dashing, jaded celebrity journalist named Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), who tools around in his Triumph TR3A sports car and mingles with movie stars and louche aristocrats.

Furneaux proved a scene-stealer as Emma, Marcello’s live-in girlfriend, who is so tormented by his philandering that she attempts to take her own life by overdosing on pills on a night he spends with a prostitute.

Their fractured relationship reaches its climax in a scene in which Emma and Marcello heatedly bicker while parked in his car on a desolate stretch outside Rome.

“What have I done to be treated this way?” she pleads. “Not even a dog gets treated like this.”

Unmoved, Marcello assails her “aggressive, sticky, maternal love” before driving off alone, leaving a teary, solitary Emma to walk home along a dusty road.

Furneaux found further acclaim as a star of Polanski’s widely hailed cinematic masterpiece “Repulsion” (1965), a taut, unsettling psychological thriller.

In the film, Furneaux plays Helen Ledoux, a cosmopolitan, sexually liberated denizen of Swinging London who shares a flat with her sister, Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a vacant-eyed beautician who is descending into madness.

While Helen is the relatively untroubled of the two, blithely cavorting around with her married boyfriend as she ignores her sister’s unraveling, Furneaux had to endure her own torments behind the scenes at the hands of Polanski, a director famous for pushing his actors to the limits.

To maintain the film’s tension, the director constantly needled cast members, trying to maintain a low hum of resentment while the cameras were rolling.

Furneaux eventually complained to Michael Klinger, an uncredited producer. “Tell that little bastard to leave me alone,” she was said to have remarked.

When Klinger confronted him, Polanski responded: “Michael, I know she’s a nice girl. She’s too bloody nice. She’s supposed to be playing a bitch. Every day I have to make her into a bitch.”

Yvonne Elizabeth Scatcherd was born May 11, 1926, in Roubaix, in northern France, the eldest of two daughters of Joseph and Amy (Furneaux) Scatcherd. Her British father was an executive who rose to managing director of the venerable insurance company Lloyd’s of London. Her mother, who was English but of French descent, oversaw the home.

The family moved to London when Yvonne was 11, before the outbreak of World War II. They lost their home to a German air raid during the Blitz, but everyone survived.

Yvonne attended the St. Paul’s Girls’ School. After graduation in 1946, she was accepted to St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University, and graduated in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in modern languages, with a focus on French literature.

She then studied acting for two years at the Royal Academy, where she adopted her mother’s maiden name as a tribute — a decision she came to regret. “This, combined with my rather Continental appearance, has always worked against me in getting British roles,” she told The Daily News.

Even so, her Pan-European aura and facility in five languages earned her roles in Italian, French, West German and Spanish films over the years.

While filming the “The Count of Monte Cristo” in France in 1961, she met her future husband, French cinematographer and former fighter pilot Jacques Natteau. They married at Guildhall in London the next year. The bride wore a rakish black bowler and black veil. “The style was accidental,” she told British newspaper The Daily Mirror. “I just liked the hat.”

Furneaux lowered the curtain on her acting career in the early 1970s, although she briefly returned in the 1984 comedy “Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie,” starring Donald Pleasence.

Her son, Nicholas, is her only immediate survivor. Her husband died in 2007.

Despite her French and British roots, Furneaux felt a deep bond with Italy, where she earned an early impact role under another lion of cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni, in his 1955 film, “Le Amiche,” or “The Girlfriends,” an incisive survey of bourgeois life from the perspective of five women in Turin.

In 1962, she and her husband bought and renovated a Medieval castle northeast of Rome, as they divided their professional lives among Rome, London and Paris.

Asked later in life which country had the biggest impact on her, Furneaux responded: “Italy. Because England taught me everything, but Italy gave me everything.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.