Catherine Deneuve may had made her first film more than half a century ago, but don’t think of calling her or an ‘icon’ – and you can keep your retrospectives and honorary gongs
‘YOU CAN smoke pot in Amsterdam but you cannot smoke cigarettes in a hotel. Crazy.” Perhaps it’s the way she’s hanging out of the balcony of London’s Dorchester Hotel, cheeky cigarette in hand, but Catherine Deneuve is rather less intimidating than we supposed.
“Intimidating? You think so?” she laughs. “I am not so intimidating, no?”
She's right; charming and downright coquettish, Deneuve could not be less like the enigmatic, prim, ice maidens that made her a global brand. Dressed in a rust trouser suit that only a French woman could co-ordinate around and looking considerably less than her 67 years, Deneuve's ensemble and reputation say " grande dame" but the lady cries "non, non".
"That's a terrible word, dame," she says. "I feel bad about that, about being a dame. I think actresses are girls and actors are boys. Not only for myself but the others in the profession. I don't see how we can be damesat all." She affects a comic theatrical sigh.
"Maybe it's more the idea that once you're a damethere are a whole lot of things you can't be anymore. So ' grand dame' is an expression I see all the time outside France but it's one I dislike." She's equally dismissive of terms such as "icon" and says that retrospectives and honorary gongs only make her queasy.
"I'm not too keen on special awards," she says. "I don't have time to sit through my old films. I don't even have time to see all the films I'd like to see. If I've seen them twice I never watch them again." For Deneuve diehards, the notion of getting through a year without dusting off The Umbrellas of Cherbourgor Belle de Jouris likely too much to bear. But the actress admits to feeling uncomfortably manacled to those early star-making performances.
"I've never done an interview without talking about Belle de Jour, you know?" she says. "It's the most emblematic film I've done. And at the beginning that used to annoy me. Sometimes when you've answered 1,200 questions about the same film over 10 or 15 years, it's a lot. You think: 'Can they all talk about something else? It was 30 years ago.' But I realise it's a film that is bigger than me. I have to accept it. It's like that. It's a fact. Audrey Tautou was telling me that she always gets asked about Amélie. It's the same thing. It's a film that's a look and a style. It was so tight. You don't think of the movie without thinking of her. She's Améliejust like I am Belle de Jour. We're bonded."
Thus, Potiche, her 106th film, counter-casts Deneuve as a 1970s trophy wife forced into terse period labour negotiations and romantic shenanigans. A twinkly comedy that pitches the hausfrau against her reactionary husband and union unrest, Potiche's humour is largely derived from watching Deneuve doing things we never expected Deneuve to do. Such as jogging in a tracksuit. Or disco-dancing with co-star Gérard Depardieu.
It's their sixth film together; they first shared screen time in François Truffaut's The Last Metromore than 20 years ago. "I think he has an intimacy with actresses. He works only with actresses he likes in the first place. If he does not know them he will meet them. He has that feeling for actresses. He's always very generous, very charming and very, very funny."
Born in occupied Paris to French stage and screen actors Maurice Dorléac and Renée Deneuve, Catherine Fabienne Dorléac had shot her first film by 11 and had moved in with director Roger Vadim at 17 but remained unsure about movies until working with Jacques Demy on the 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
“Demy was the most important director in my life,” she says. “He allowed me to see what being an actress could be. It was he who persuaded me to keep on doing it. I love the idea that I could otherwise have been an architect or an archaeologist or an anthropologist. I think I would have liked something academic and cultural. But I’m not sure I would have been able to do very long studies at all. So it was just as well.”
Despite the era Deneuve says she has very little personal recollection of Potiche's prescribed gender roles: "My parents were quite unconventional and I'm from a family of women – I have three sisters, no? We were not raised like that. We were a little different. I remember we were not allowed to wear pants at school, so in the winter my mother would let us wear them under our skirts. It does not sound like a big deal but I can remember bars in the 1970s in New York where they would not allow you in if you were wearing pants and you were a woman. I'm sure like all women and men, I know the sensation of just being there to support someone else. But I was never going to be a trophy wife."
For Deneuve, indeed, wifedom ended in 1972 when she and photographer David Bailey called time on their union of seven years.
There were subsequent high profile liaisons with Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Marcello Mastroianni, Canal+ tycoon Pierre Lescure and Francois Truffaut. But marriage was out of the question. “I think it can probably be a very romantic thing,” says the grandmother of four. “But I do not understand it. Years ago marriage had a function to help women to raise a family and she was taken care of. But that has disappeared. Women work now. They have contraception. And two-thirds of marriages fail. But I have no problem with marriage as long as you can get divorced.”
An Oscar-winner and the star of such seminal films as Repulsion, Deneuve has nothing left to prove as an actor yet says she couldn't consider slacking off. "I must love it, otherwise I could not do it. I cannot think of a more boring job to do if you didn't like it. It's terrible. I can see from outside what it must look like. Most of the time they just see you waiting. That's the thing I hear most from visitors to set. 'Aren't you bored to wait so long between takes?' But the waiting of the actor means you are in the middle of something. It's not boring. It's not the same as waiting for the bus."
No matter how she protests, it’s difficult to see the one-time muse of Yves Saint Laurent and former face of Chanel No 5 as being anything other than iconic. If anyone knows why French women look like Deneuve and the rest of us look like the rest of us, it must be her, surely?
"It's true that French women are stylish and into fashion. But something we don't have that the English and Irish have is extravagance. Extravagance is expressive, no?" Vive la difference.
Essential Deneuve
Repulsion (1965)
Director Roman Polanski’s first English-language release cast the divine Ms Deneuve as a Belgian manicurist losing her mind in swinging London. Men and walls have rarely seemed so terrifying.
Belle de Jour (1967)
By day, Deneuve is the perfect housewife, but from 2pm to 5pm, she’s exploring sadomasochistic fantasies in a high-class brothel. Luis Buñuel’s groundbreaking film codified an image David Thompson has as “the cool blonde, forever hinting at intimations of depravity”.
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)
Star-crossed lovers. Bittersweet musical numbers. Umbrellas. Jacques Demy’s quirky classic made a haughty-looking young Deneuve a superstar.
The Last Metro (1980)
During the German occupation in the second World War, a Parisian wife struggles to keep her Jewish husband hidden. François Truffaut’s film won 10 Césars – including two for headliners Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu.
The Hunger (1983)
In Tony Scott’s deliriously trashy horror, Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie play a counter-cultural vampire couple who invite Susan Sarandon into their bed.
Poticheis at the Irish Film Institute
