French Celebrities Bio | Catherine Deneuve

Tuesday, December 14th at 14.15 by Katharine Barrau

Catherine Deneuve is one of the grandes dames of the French acting world, a woman with so much gravitas – not just due to her extraordinary career and acting range but also her timeless beauty, political activism and humanitarian work – that it’s difficult to name any public figure that enjoys greater standing and affection in France.

She was born Catherine Fabienne Dorléac on October 22nd 1943, the third of four daughters in Paris and made her acting debut in 1957’s Les Collégiennes as a 13-year-old. Despite plenty of minor roles in subsequent years it was Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) that brought her to both French and international attention.

Her film career developed speedily with roles under acclaimed directors Roman Polanski (Repulsion, 1965) and Luis Bunuel (Belle de Jour, 1967), the latter causing a stir with its controversial subject matter. In it, Denueve played a part-time prostitute in what many critics call the director’s masterpiece.

On a personal note, tragedy struck: her sister Françoise Dorléac, with whom Catherine starred in the 1967 musical classic Les Desmoiselles de Rochefort, was killed in a car crash.

Many of her roles saw her cast as a kind of mysterious femme fatale and although the 1970s saw her make several less successful or notable films, she came back in style in 1980 with a superb performance in Truffaut’s The Last Metro, in which she played a stage actress in Nazi-occupied Paris. The role won her a César award for best actress and her career was back on track.

Displaying a penchant for unusual roles and remarkable versatility, she starred as a bisexual vampire alongside David Bowie and Susan Sarandon in cult classic The Hunger (1983), though this was a rare foray into Hollywood moviemaking – Deneuve preferred to take roles in European movies. Interestingly, despite her apparent public confidence, she has always avoided theatrical performances due to stage fright.

Her poise and class was perfectly showcased in the epic drama Indochine (1992), in which she played an upper-class plantation owner who falls in love with a French naval officer in 1930s Vietnam. Her performance, named by many critics as the best of her career to date, earned Deneuve a first Academy Award nomination.

Today she still works steadily and is a regular on film festival juries (she was honoured at Cannes in 2008, the year she starred in her 100th film, Un Conte de Noël, alongside her daughter Chiara Mastroianni).

The epitome of French elegance and beauty, she succeeded Brigitte Bardot as the model for Marianne from 1985 to 1989 and such is her creative prowess that she even designs glasses, shoes, jewellery and greeting cards.

Almost fifty years since her first film role, she is one of the most recognised and admired French people in the world.