{"id":229364,"date":"2026-05-13T00:52:30","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T00:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/229364\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T00:52:30","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T00:52:30","slug":"cannes-queen-catherine-deneuve-on-life-love-and-still-going-strong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/229364\/","title":{"rendered":"Cannes Queen Catherine Deneuve on Life, Love and Still Going Strong"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tCatherine Deneuve<\/a>, of course, brings her dog.<\/p>\n

\n\tJack \u2014 \u201cnot Jacques, Jack!\u201d \u2014 a pointy-eared Shiba Inu, stands at attention throughout the interview, his eyes fixed on her like a discreet, furry security guard.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI usually have him on set with me,\u201d she says, patting his head. \u201cHe is always very good.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWe\u2019re tucked into a cozy corner of a boutique Left Bank hotel. Deneuve\u2019s tasteful Louis Vuitton handbag is tossed on the chaise lounge. As we chat, she punctuates her answers with the occasional puff from her vape \u2014 \u201cI did quit smoking for a while, even did hypnosis, but I started again,\u201d she says, waving the vape. \u201cThis, however, is not smoking. It\u2019s nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a classy, casual, almost domestic setting for what at times feels akin to a papal audience. This is Catherine Deneuve! Not just the face of French film but quite literally the face of France. In 1989, for the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Deneuve\u2019s face was used as the image of Marianne, the French national emblem of liberty and reason. She is, de facto, an icon.<\/p>\n

\n\tDeneuve\u2019s onscreen persona is simultaneously that of sweet Genevi\u00e8ve, romantic idealism personified, in Jacques Demy\u2019s magical 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg<\/a>; and Carole Ledoux, the Belgian girl in London whose sexual repression turns homicidal in Roman Polanski\u2019s Repulsion (1965). She\u2019s S\u00e9verine, haute-bourgeois housewife who moonlights as an S&M submissive in Luis Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s Belle de Jour (1967); and the camp star who sends up her own iconography in both Tony Scott\u2019s lesbian vampire thriller The Hunger (1983) and Fran\u00e7ois Ozon\u2019s murder mystery musical 8 Women<\/a> (2002).<\/p>\n

\n\tAt once liberated and conservative, radical and restrained (and, some would say, occasionally reactionary), Deneuve, more than any actress, more than any filmmaker, embodies French cinema in all its glorious, confounding contradiction. Deneuve is not just a legend of the Croisette. She\u2019s the legend.<\/p>\n

\n\tDeneuve returns to Cannes not as a retrospective figure but as a working actor. She has two films in official competition<\/a>: Alongside Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel and others in the ensemble drama Parallel Tales, from two-time Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, A Salesman); and as the mother of L\u00e9a Seydoux in Gentle Monster, from Austrian director Marie Kreutzer (Corsage). \u201cOh, they are very small roles,\u201d she says modestly. \u201cBut even a small role must be necessary. When a role is small, I always ask myself: \u2018If this character were removed from the script, would it matter?\u2019 If not, then it isn\u2019t very interesting. I\u2019m also of course interested in the director, especially if they are young and the way they speak about the film has energy, something open and new. Then I want to be part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Cannes is more than a current stop on the circuit for Deneuve \u2014 it is the throughline of her career, the stage on which her legend was first forged.<\/p>\n

\n\tDeneuve\u2019s Cannes story began with a coronation. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, her first lead role, won the Palme d\u2019Or and transformed the 20-year-old ingenue into an international<\/a> star.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe knew [the film] was special when were shooting it, the story was very different, and the film was entirely sung. Everything had to be recorded before shooting, so we had to learn the whole film in advance. It was a very special experience,\u201d she recalls. \u201cBut it was the beginning of my career, and everything was new. Even winning [the Palme d\u2019Or] felt unreal because I didn\u2019t fully understand it yet. The moment I especially remember from Cannes is when [Lars von Trier\u2019s] Dancer in the Dark<\/a> won the Palme d\u2019Or [in 2000]. That recognition, that stayed with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tFrom left: Lars Von Trier, Catherine Deneuve, and Bjork at the \u2018Dancer In The Dark\u2019 premiere at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival in 2000.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFocKan\/WireImage<\/p>\n

\n\tBetween Umbrellas and Dancer \u2014 two musicals at opposite poles of the joy-to-anguish spectrum \u2014 Deneuve has been back to Cannes so many times, she can barely keep count. Her 1994 festival, where she served on the jury alongside Clint Eastwood, stands out. The jury\u2019s Palme d\u2019Or pick was Pulp Fiction. Deneuve handed the trophy to Quentin Tarantino, anointing a new generation of indie cinema \u2014 a choice that would prove as divisive as it was defining.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOh, the reaction in the theater! People were shouting, they were so angry. It was such a new kind of film that some didn\u2019t understand it,\u201d she remembers. \u201cBut inside the jury, there was not much conflict. Clint Eastwood, though, didn\u2019t talk much. He knew what he decided, but he didn\u2019t explain it much to the others.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tScandal, for Deneuve, is nothing new. Over the course of six-plus decades onscreen playing serial killers, kinky housewives and lesbian vampires, she\u2019s rarely seen a cinema piety she wouldn\u2019t transgress. The fresh-faced Genevi\u00e8ve of Umbrellas would be shocked.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was just a year after Umbrellas that Deneuve transformed for Polanski\u2019s dark, violent and over-the-top Repulsion. Her performance shifted from romantic transparency, from the open joy of Genevi\u00e8ve, to Carole Ledoux\u2019s unreadable froideur.<\/p>\n

\n\tRepulsion and, more significantly, her performance two years later in Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s Belle de Jour, would cement Deneuve\u2019s image as the \u201cice queen\u201d of French cinema, as an indecipherable projection of male desire, poised between repression and release. For a modern audience, the premise of the film, and its depiction of female sexuality, seems almost inconceivable.<\/p>\n

\n\tDeneuve admits some Belle de Jour scenes \u201cwere difficult. I wasn\u2019t ready to do everything exactly as written,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd Luis Bu\u00f1uel didn\u2019t explain much to actors, so at the beginning, it was complicated. But the film went well, and after that we did another film together [Tristana], which was wonderful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRepulsion and Belle de Jour turned her into a bona fide sex symbol. (Her two Playboy pictorials, in 1963 and 1965, the latter shot by future husband David Bailey, also helped.) But such is the apparent contradiction that is Catherine Deneuve that the actress who helped define the language of sexual liberation rarely bared it all onscreen.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tCatherine Deneuve at the Cannes Film Festival on May 10, 1983<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPool GARCIA\/URLI\/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m not a big fan of nudity in films,\u201d she muses. \u201cWhen you are naked, you are no longer quite a character \u2014 you are just a person, a body. It\u2019s difficult to stay in the story of a character.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a similar tension in Deneuve\u2019s public image and her cultural politics, which can appear, depending on where you\u2019re standing, to be simultaneously progressive and reactionary.<\/p>\n

\n\tOffscreen, Deneuve has been a mostly dependable progressive: a signatory of the 1971 \u201cManifesto of the 343\u201d protesting France\u2019s abortion laws; a petitioner against the death penalty; and, at Cannes last year, a voice condemning the killing of Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna. But the petition most people remember is her 2018 open letter in Le Monde, chastising #MeToo as a witch hunt. She later apologized to victims and distanced herself from those who had \u201cfound it strategic to support me.\u201d For many, however, the letter \u2014 combined with her refusal to distance herself from Polanski and longtime friend G\u00e9rard Depardieu \u2014 convicted in 2025 of sexually assaulting two women on a film set \u2014 places her firmly in the reactionary camp.<\/p>\n

\n\tAsked who was her best screen partner \u2014 from an incomparable list that includes Marcello Mastroianni, Jack Lemmon, Burt Reynolds, Daniel Auteuil and Michel Piccoli \u2014 she barely hesitates. \u201cG\u00e9rard Depardieu. Because he is completely present. With some actors, you feel they are not fully listening. With him, everything is alive in the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn #MeToo\u2019s lasting impact, she is circumspect. \u201cIt\u2019s very complicated. Sometimes accusations come many years later, which raises questions. People must be very careful. It has made everyone more aware, more cautious. I\u2019m very careful [what I say].\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the queen of French cinema is not one for regrets. She would have liked to work with Alfred Hitchcock \u2014 \u201cWe had a project. It was a sort of spy movie. It was a fine script, so I met him, but then nothing happened\u201d \u2014 and to have made a few more American movies. \u201cI had a very good experience working with Jack Lemmon [on her first Hollywood movie, 1969\u2019s The April Fools]. Then I did the film with Burt Reynolds [1975\u2019s Hustle], which I liked very much. He was a wonderful actor and such a nice man.\u201d And, as Deneuve put it in an earlier interview, \u201cvery funny \u2026 for an American.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe does still long for celluloid and the era of screening the dailies. \u201cI used to like watching dailies \u2014 discussing scenes afterward. You see some things that you wouldn\u2019t notice when you are shooting,\u201d she notes, wistfully. \u201c[Now] directors watch monitors instead of being directly involved in the scene. That has disappeared. Everything is faster now, less collective.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat hasn\u2019t changed for the 82-year-old actress is the essential appeal of the work: \u201cI still love going to the cinema \u2014 being in a theater with people, feeling that shared atmosphere. And I still love making films. I try to choose only what I truly want to do. It\u2019s not just work \u2014 it\u2019s something I love.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOutside, Paris moves at its usual pace. Deneuve gathers her things. Jack rises with her, attentive as ever.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s a great luck to have a life like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Catherine Deneuve, of course, brings her dog. Jack \u2014 \u201cnot Jacques, Jack!\u201d \u2014 a pointy-eared Shiba Inu, stands…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229365,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[90078,90079,4883,9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-229364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-cannes-2026","tag-catherine-deneuve","tag-international","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}