Catherine Deneuve

Catherine Deneuve
Actress, Dancer in the Dark

Born: October 22, 1943 (age 71), Paris, France
Height: 1.68 m
Spouse: David Bailey (m. 1965–1972)
Children: Chiara Mastroianni, Christian Vadim
Siblings: Françoise Dorléac, Sylvie Dorléac, Danielle Clariond

Catherine Deneuve was born in Paris, France, the third of four daughters to Renée Dorléac (a retired stage actress) and the second of three daughters to Maurice Dorléac (now deceased). She made her screen debut in Les collégiennes (1957), where she was credited as Catherine Dorléac. She began using her mother’s maiden name professionally in 1960, in order to differentiate herself from her up-and-coming actress sister, Françoise Dorléac.

Although raised Catholic, Deneuve

began to defy convention at an early age. In 1961, the 17-year-old starlet left home and moved in with Ukranian director Roger Vadim, who at 33 was twice divorced and almost twice her age. He was also her mentor, and directed her in Vice and Virtue (1963). On June 18, 1963, she gave birth to their son, Christian Vadim, at the age of 19. Within a month after that, the relationship was over and they broke off contact (he had five wives and four children, and died in 2000).

Deneuve’s breakthrough came the following year with the excellent musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), in which she gave an unforgettable performance as a romantic middle-class girl who falls in love with a young soldier but gets imprisoned in a loveless marriage with another man; the director was the gifted Jacques Demy. She followed this up

with a riveting performance as a schizophrenic killer in Roman Polanski’s suspense classic Repulsion (1965).

On August 19, 1965, the 21-year-old Deneuve married British photographer David Bailey after a brief courtship. The marriage was soured by mutual infidelities as well as a language barrier (he did not speak French and she was still in the process of becoming fluent in English), eventually ending in an amicable divorce. They remain friends, but Deneuve has shunned the idea of marriage ever since.

Meanwhile, she played a married woman who works as a part-time prostitute every afternoon in Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece, Belle de Jour (1967), then reunited with Demy for another musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), which co-starred her elder sister, Françoise Dorléac. Shortly before the film’s release, Dorléac was killed in a fatal car accident at the age of 25, leaving Deneuve devastated. Working continuously despite her grief (or perhaps because of it), she reunited with Buñuel for Tristana (1970) and gave a great performance for François Truffaut in Mississippi Mermaid (1969), a kind of apotheosis of her “frigid femme fatale” persona.

Following her separation from Bailey in 1970 (they officially divorced in 1972), Deneuve began an intense relationship with Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni. With four onscreen pairings, they became Europe’s golden couple. On May 28, 1972, Deneuve gave birth to their daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, at the age of 28. The relationship with Mastroianni ended in 1975, but the two remained friends up until his death from pancreatic cancer on December 19, 1996, with Deneuve present at his bedside.

For the most part, Deneuve showed little interest in pursuing a Hollywood career. In her first two American films, she was paired with Jack Lemmon in the romantic comedy The April Fools (1969) and Burt Reynolds in the crime drama Hustle (1975). Though the reviews were decent, both films met with lukewarm box office. To increase her exposure, Deneuve became the face of Chanel No. 5, causing sales of the perfume to soar in the United States.

Deneuve’s magnificent work in Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980), as a stage actress in Nazi-occupied Paris, was a career milestone and won her a César Award for Best Actress. Deneuve’s third foray into Hollywood came in 1983, when she starred in Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983) as a stylish, seductive bisexual vampire living in Manhattan who sets out in search of new blood. The film became a cult classic, and her erotic love scene with Susan Sarandon unintentionally made Deneuve a lesbian icon, so much that she would later have to threaten legal action to stop the lesbian magazine Curve from using “Deneuve” as the original title. In 1985, her status as a beauty icon was cemented when her profile was chosen as the model for Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic seen on French coins and stamps. Later, she debuted as a film producer with Strange Place for an Encounter (1988), but has not ventured back into the profession since.

Deneuve’s unchanging beauty and controlled acting skills were perfectly showcased in the romantic melodrama Indochine (1992), in which she played an upper-class plantation owner who falls in love with a young French naval officer (Vincent Perez) in 1930s Vietnam. The film won both the Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Foregin Film during the 1993 awards season, while Deneuve won her second César Award for Best Actress and, at the age of 49, received her first Academy Award nomination, making her one of the distinct few to be nominated for a non-English-speaking performance.

She was very good in André Téchiné’s My Favorite Season (1993), and had more high-caliber leading roles in The Convent (1995) and Place Vendôme (1998). Lars von Trier cast Deneuve in his musical drama Dancer in the Dark (2000), opposite eccentric singer Björk. The film won the Palme d’Or at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. The following year, she made another rare return to Hollywood with a starring role in The Musketeer (2001), a France-based epic adventure.

Now in her late fifties and a grandmother, she continues to work at a steady pace, notably and most recently in this year’s acclaimed musical 8 Women (2002). Although the elegant and always radiant Deneuve has never appeared on stage, she is universally hailed as one of the “grandes dames” of French cinema, joining a list that includes such illustrious talents as Simone Signoret, Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Moreau, and the younger Juliette Binoche.