Catherine Deneuve, 80 years of the myth of French cinema

Catherine Deneuve, one of the greatest French movie stars of all time, turns 80 this Sunday. How will you celebrate it? “I’m not interested in that,” she answered recently to Paris Match magazine, doing what occupies her these days: talking about her latest film starring Bernadette Chirac.

Born in the 17th arrondissement of Paris in 1943, Deneuve has a career spanning six decades, a filmography of around 150 films, awards at major European festivals and an Oscar nomination for “Indochina” in 1992.

You can even to show off after they released an album together Serge Gainsbourg“Souviens-toi de m’oublier”, 1981.

She, who never agreed with the title the grande dame of French cinemaparadoxically achieves its own 80th anniversary playing the first lady, wife of the late President Jacques Chirac, in “Bernadette”, a comedy directed by Léa Domenach published in France last October 4.

“It’s not”biographical film‘”, he repeated several times, explaining that biography is a genre he is not particularly interested in.

He also doesn’t want to hear about a movie of his life, always jealous of her privacy and she is not very happy with the treatment the media has given her during her career.

His real name is Catherine Fabienne Dorléacbut she took the stage name Deneuve from her mother’s maiden name, also an actress. Renée Jeanne Deneuve (better known as Renée Simonot, and died in 2021 at the age of 109).

“It was my sister’s fault!” Deneuve remarked about the name change in an interview with the program “Beau Geste”, on the public channel France 2, on September 24.

“I prefer Dorléac (…) I don’t like Deneuve too much,” admitted the actress, who recalled that when she started in cinema In the shadow of her sister, the interpreter Françoise Dorléac, their mother told them that there could not be two Dorléacs.

Françoise, who died in Car accident in 1967, he kept his original surname because he started his career earlier. career. But it would be Deneuve who would become the real one myth.

Commissioned by major European directors

In 1964, Deneuve worked with his sister on “Cherbourg Umbrellas”with the role that launched his career, and with Polanski in 1965 “Refusal”. A little later, in 1967, she got a role that elevated her: that of the wife of a doctor who is dedicated prostitution occasionally in “Belle de Jour” (1967), by Luis Buñuel.

At that time, he also did not stop taking his first steps Hollywood fascinated by his mythologized French beautyonly on the level of stars like Brigitte Bardot or Jeanne Moreau.

Among them was a mother, something she had always wanted. She gave birth to her first child, Christiana, in 1963, when she was only 20 years old, which is the result of relationship with Roger Vadim and without being married. The second will arrive almost two decades later, his daughter Chiara in 1972, with an Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni.

The films “Tristan” (Buñuel, 1970); “The Last Metro” (François Truffaut, 1980); “Indochina” (Régis Wargnier, 1992) or “Dancer in the Dark” (Lars von Trier, 2000) are just some of Titles who watered theirs fruitful career in the following decades, he already became a symbol of French and European cinema with his beauty cool and dyed blonde hair.

Is iconic image who has survived to this day and who was the protagonist of the poster of the last edition Cannes Film Festivalwhere Deneuve received Palm of honor in 2005.

The actress always refused to express it political preferences and in recent times there has been a conflict with the movement “Me too”.

In particular, she publicly defended director Roman Polanski, and in 2018 she was one of the co-signatories polemics an opinion column published in a newspaper Le Monde under the title “Defending freedom of harassment, key to sexual freedom.”

The text, with about a hundred signatures of women from all areas, accuses feminism that is taking shape “hatred of men” and sexuality.

Today he refers to himself as “a feminist“, although he says that he is against the excesses of that movement.