Catherine Deneuve, one of the greatest stars of French cinema of all time, turns 80 today. How will you celebrate? “I’m not interested in that,” he replied to Paris Match magazine during the promotion of his latest film, Bernardette, a biopic about the wife of former president Jacques Chirac that was released in France on October 4.
In his six-decade career he has shot about 150 films. In addition, he has won two César; a Cannes award; the Volpi Cup of Venice; the Donostia award, from San Sebastià, and an Oscar nomination. He even recorded an album with Serge Gainsbourg, Souviens-toi de m’oublier, in 1981.
Catherine Fabienne Dorléac was born in 1943 in Paris, in the 17th arrondissement, where most embassies are located. She took the stage name Deneuve because it was the maiden name of her mother, also actress Renée Jeanne Deneuve (better known as Renée Simonot, and died in 2021 at the age of 109).
“I prefer Dorléac (…). I don’t like Deneuve very much”, the actress confessed a month ago in an interview in which she recalled that when she started in the cinema her sister was already an actress, Françoise Dorléac was already working in the medium, and her mother told them that there could not be two Dorléacs. Françoise died in a traffic accident in 1967.
In 1964 came the film that boosted his career, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Then Repulsion, directed by Polanski, and Les señoretes de Rochefort, in which Deneuve agreed with her sister. But in 1967 came the film that made her famous, Belle de jour, directed by Luis Buñuel, where the French actress plays the wife of a doctor who occasionally engages in prostitution. At that time he tried his luck in Hollywood, which has always been fascinated by French beauty, such as Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot.
His resume also includes hits such as Tristana (Buñuel, 1970), El último metro (François Truffaut, 1980), Indoxina (Régis Wargnier, 1992) and Bailar en la oscuridad (Lars von Trier, 2000).
The last Cannes festival, in May, paid tribute to Catherine Deneuve and dedicated the poster of the edition to her. But she is not only an icon of French cinema, she is also an icon of fashion, because she is the muse of the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, and her face was even used to represent Marianne, the national symbol of the French republic, from 1985 to 1989. But it bothers her that they refer to her as a French icon and now at 80 years old and after having starred in the biopic about Bernardette Chirac she does not plan to see her life on the screen.
In her private life she has only been married once, to the British photographer David Bailey, from 1965 to 1971. Before that she had a relationship with the filmmaker Roger Vadim and in 1963 her son Christian was born. Chiara was born in 1972, from her relationship with Marcello Mastroiani.
