Catherine Deneuve

Catherine Fabienne Dorléac (Paris, October 22, 1943), artistically known as Catherine Deneuve, is a French actress.

Considered one of the greatest European actresses of the second half of the XX century, she is the muse of numerous directors and a true cultural icon. Throughout her half-century career, she has been twice awarded the César Award, nominated for an Oscar for best actress and a winner at the Cannes, San Sebastián, Berlin and Venice film festivals. She has also obtained the Lumière Prize, one of the most important awards in the world of French-language cinema, for her successful career.

Biography

Catherine Fabienne Dorléac was born in Paris during the Nazi occupation, the daughter of the actors Maurice Dorléac (1901-1979) and Jeanne Renée Deneuve (1911-2021), artistically known as Renée Simonot); she is the third of four sisters. The other three are Danielle (1937) —mother's sister only—, Françoise Dorléac (1942-1967) and Sylvie (1946).

She made her debut under the name Catherine Dorléac in Les Collégiennes (1957). He changed his last name to his mother's and, after a few jobs, the first famous director he worked with was Roger Vadim on Vice and Virtue, although his first big success came with the film 1963 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, by Jacques Demy, director with whom he made several films in the leading role.

Throughout almost six decades of his career, he has worked with directors such as Manoel de Oliveira, Roman Polanski (Repulsion), Marcel Camus, Dino Risi, Agnès Varda, André Téchiné, Luis Buñuel (Belle de jour, Tristana), Hugo Santiago, François Truffaut (The Mermaid of the Mississippi), Lars von Trier (Dancing on the darkness) and François Ozon among others.

For her role in Indochina (1992) she was nominated for an Oscar; She didn't win it, but the film did win Best Foreign Language Film. In 1994 she won the Donostia Award at the San Sebastián Festival. She has also been the winner of the Almería Tierra de Cine award and has a star on the city's walk of fame.

Catherine Deneuve at the Berlin International Film Festival (2017)

In the 1960s and 1970s, he starred in several American and British films, alongside stars such as Jack Lemmon (The April Fools, 1969), Ava Gardner (Mayerling) and Burt Reynolds (Hustle, 1975), but in general they were not successful and the actress did not establish herself as a star in Hollywood. In 1983 she regained her presence in Anglo-Saxon cinema by shooting with Susan Sarandon and David Bowie the vampirism film The Craving , directed by Tony Scott.

Especially remembered are her works with Luis Buñuel, who said of her: «She is beautiful as death, seductive as sin and cold as virtue».

On June 1, 2022, it was confirmed that she would receive the Honorary Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Other jobs

She was the muse of the designer Yves Saint Laurent, and her face came to be used to represent Marianne, the national symbol of the French republic, from 1985 to 1989. Deneuve in 1997 was the protagonist of the video for the song N& #39;oubliez jamais by Joe Cocker. She is currently a goodwill ambassador for Unesco.

Private life

Catherine Deneuve in 2000

She has two children, Christian Vadim (born 1963) with director Roger Vadim, and Chiara Mastroianni (born 1972) from the actress' four-year relationship with Italian Marcello Mastroianni. Catherine Deneuve has only been married once, to British photographer David Bailey, a marriage that lasted from 1965 to 1972.

She was the sister of the actress Françoise Dorléac, who died in a car accident in 1967. She was the one who put Catherine Deneuve in contact with filmmakers like Polanski and Buñuel. They worked together on Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. In 1996, she published a book entitled Elle s’appelait Françoise , written together with Patrick Modiano, in which she tells how the death of her sister changed her life forever. But the most tremendous and at the same time the most beautiful thing that Deneuve recounts in that book is that, during her relationship with François Truffaut (who had previously been Françoise Dorléac's lover), they both knew, without ever speaking about it, that they shared a passion secret. That passion, naturally, was called Françoise. The seventy-six-year-old French actress suffered a "very limited and reversible" ischemic stroke on November 5, 2019; for which she was hospitalized, her family reported in a statement.

Documentaries and biographies

• 1996: Elle s'appelait Françoise
• 2004: À l'ombre de moi-même
• 2010: Catherine Deneuve, belle et bien là, de Anne Andreu
• 2010: Une certaine lenteur, Rivages poche
• 2010:Gwénaëlle Le Gras, Le mythe Deneuve: Une « star » française entre classicisme et modernité, Nouveau Monde, 2010 ISBN 978-2-84736-487-3

Filmography

Awards

Oscar

Satellite Awards

Caesar

Cannes International Film Festival

Venice International Film Festival

San Sebastian International Film Festival