CLAUDINE LONGET, CHANTEUSE AND ACTRESS WHOSE CAREER ENDED WHEN SHE SHOT HER LOVER, DIES AGE 84.
She played the female lead, opposite Peter Sellers, in Blake Edwards’s 1968 film The Party, but she was best known for her appearances on the weekly television show hosted by her husband, Andy Williams. She was, in Williams’s words, “a beautiful, athletic, slender, petite brunette with large doe eyes”.
From her spouse’s side, she radiated a mixture of glamour and wholesome domesticity. On the set of Williams’s famous Christmas specials, she would cast protective glances towards the couple’s young children as they unwrapped parcels under the studio tree.
But few stars have made the journey from idol to pariah quite so swiftly and irreversibly as Claudine Longet who, on the afternoon of March 21 1976, shot her lover, the champion skier Spider Sabich, with a .22 handgun at their chalet in Aspen, Colorado. The events of that Sunday afternoon shifted the emphasis so firmly from femme to fatale that even now, decades later, some residents of America’s most exclusive ski resort have yet to forgive her.
She inspired a mercilessly derisive song, “Claudine,” by the Rolling Stones. Originally destined for the 1980 album Emotional Rescue, it eventually appeared as a bonus track on the Some Girls re-release in 2011. “Now only Spider knows for sure,” one verse begins, “But he ain’t talkin’ about it any more/ Is he, Claudine?/ There’s blood in the chalet/And blood in the snow/[She] Washed her hands of the whole damn show/The best thing you could do, Claudine.”
In April 1976, before her case had even been heard, the first series of NBC’s satirical show Saturday Night Live featured a sketch called “The Claudine Longet Invitational” in which male skiers competed in a slalom competition, at the end of which they were “accidentally” shot by Claudine Longet.
As Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote in their 1986 history of SNL, “One of [Standards and Practices vice president Herminio Traviesas’s] biggest mistakes came from not seeing how a piece played in performance. The sketch in question was [Michael] O’Donoghue’s ‘Claudine Longet Invitational’ ski tournament, which aired when she was facing trial for manslaughter. Traviesas, to O’Donoghue’s complete surprise, let it pass on the basis of a reading over the phone, not realizing that it came across much tougher visually than it did in the script. NBC’s legal representative on the show also let it pass after consulting with an outside law firm. Almost as soon as it aired, Longet’s estranged husband, Andy Williams, was on the phone with NBC’s lawyers in Los Angeles, threatening to sue. To placate Williams, Don Pardo read an apology in a subsequent show. ‘It is desirable to correct any misunderstanding,’ Pardo said, ‘that a suggestion was made that, in fact, a crime had been committed.… This is a statement of apology if the material was misinterpreted.’ Not a very sincere apology, but it served to keep the show out of court.”
God speed Claudine Longet
— Danny Deraney (@DannyDeraney) May 14, 2026