NEW YORK (AP) — Toby Talbot, a great patron of art house cinema who with her husband, Dan, helped introduce movie lovers to celebrated works from Jean-Luc Godard,Pedro Almodóvar and hundreds of other international filmmakers and to American favorites old and new, has died at age 96.

Talbot died Sept. 15 at her home in Manhattan, The New York Times reported Monday. The cause was complications from Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disease.

The Talbots, through their distribution company, New Yorker Films, and such prominent Manhattan theaters as The New Yorker and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, were a prolific force behind the transformation of movies in the 1960s and '70s from popular entertainment to an art form regarded with the seriousness of literature or painting. Martin Scorsese, Pauline Kael, Wim Wenders and Susan Sontag were among their many friends and customers, turning up for the latest Godard release, a documentary about Sen. Joseph McCarthy or a double feature of Cary Grant movies.

“The New Yorker was a very special place. It was a place of communion, where the customers, the owners, the programmers, and the filmmakers seemed to be part of the same family,” Scorsese wrote in the foreword to Toby Talbot's memoir, “The New Yorker Theater,” which came out in 2009. “Dan and Toby were right there on the front lines, showing films ... distributing films, sticking their neck out on pictures by Godard and Bertolucci and Fassbinder and Straub and Huillet and Oshima and Sembene.”