Catherine Deneuve at Eighty

French actress Catherine Deneuve, widely regarded as a living symbol of France for her beauty, her sophistication, and also her acting ability, turns eighty years old today.

There are few celebrities for whom I will devote an entire blog post on the occasion of a milestone birthday, and Catherine Deneuve is certainly one of them.  For good reason.  She's my all-time favorite actress.  She got me into seeing foreign-language movies when I was in college, which happened to be the 1980s, a time when American cinema (like everything else in America) began a long, steady decline that's still in progress.  Any new movie starring her was bound to be more interesting and entertaining than what was coming out of Hollywood.

Of course, Catherine Deneuve has been making interesting, spellbinding, and incredibly complex movies since she made her first movie appearance at the age of 13.  Her first major movie, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, from 1964, which made her an international star, set the standard.  A romance movie entirely sung?  With exciting and dramatic use of color by director Jacques Demy in depicting Cherbourg, a drab, gray port city on the English Channel?  Madness!  Who would see a movie like that?  Well, a lot of folks did, and moviegoers have idolized Catherine Deneuve ever since. Women wanted to be like her and men wanted to be with her.   

In the 59 years since, Mademoiselle Deneuve has given performances as innovative as the films she appeared in.  There was Belle de Jour, a 1967 drama directed by Luis Buñuel that starred our heroine as a bored housewife who acted out her sexual fantasies in a brothel, which she played by projecting a personality at odds with her cool beauty while also using her looks to make her character an enigma who couldn't be figured out.  She perfected that complexity in Buñuel's 1970 movie Tristana, where she played the ward of a nobleman with antiquated, misogynistic values.  And in Roman Polanski's 1965 thriller Repulsion, her first English-language movie, she displayed vulnerability that belied her character's homicidal paranoia against men - more fatale than femme - as a Belgian girl living in Swinging London.   

Unlike other European actresses like Sophia Loren, however, Catherine Deneuve was never established as a star in Hollywood - perhaps because while Sophia Loren could be believable as an Italian immigrant in America in a period piece or as an Italian-American woman in a movie set in the present day, there is little demand for a French actress in a contemporary Hollywood movie, and for obvious reasons. If there is a French actress in a role of any consequence in a Hollywood movie, it's usually to make use of her accent, and that's usually a sign that the movie itself is a mess.  (Isabelle Huppert in Heaven's Gate.  Isabelle Adjani in Ishtar.  The end.)  But Mademoiselle Deneuve has made the odd Hollywood movie here and there, her first being the 1969 romantic comedy The April Fools, with Jack Lemmon (his first movie after The Odd Couple) - directed by Stuart Rosenberg, who had made Cool Hand Luke two years earlier.  As a trophy wife in that film (to a character played by Sinatra pal Peter Lawford), she unexpectedly displayed the same sweetness and silliness written into the role, which was originally intended for Shirley MacLaine.  Alas, Mademoiselle Deneuve spent the seventies making commercials and doing print ads for Chanel No. 5 for the U.S. market, which is how Americans got to know her best - not as an actress but as a spokesmodel.  Which is sort of embarrassing - not for her, but for us, as we silly Americans always make icons out of American actors who are so limited in their abilities they can only play extensions of themselves while we ignore more talented foreign actors simply because we're too lazy to learn foreign languages or read subtitles. 

Mademoiselle Deneuve really came into her own with her stunning performance as Marion Steiner in 1980's The Last Metro, Francois Truffaut's love letter to the theater set in the time of the Nazi occupation of Paris, in which she keeps a theater company going during the darkest days of the war while hiding her Jewish husband from the Germans.  Not only did she excel in the role of a strong, responsible woman in a movie that celebrated the triumph of art over war, she also found a special chemistry with Gerard Depardieu, who played an actor in her troupe who was secretly a member of the French Resistance.  The movies they went on to make in the years after firmly established them as the Hepburn and Tracy of France, with Depardieu himself calling his regular co-star "the man I'd like to be." 

I would be remiss if I did not mention her productive relationship with French director André Téchiné, with whom she has done some of boldest and most serious work as an actress, such as The Scene of The Crime, My Favorite Season, Thieves and Changing Times.  She said that movies like these, which look at human relations with a sensitive touch and which allow her to project greater psychological complexity in her performances, can only be made by one type of director.  "There are some directors who are more feminine than others, like Téchiné, like Truffaut," she said. "They are an exceptional gift to actresses."

So, if you ever wondered why she never found a comparable Hollywood director to work with, there's your answer. 😛  

Catherine Deneuve is still active as an actress, and while it may be hyperbolic to say her best work is still ahead of her, she still has good work ahead of her for as long as she allows herself or as long as God and nature allow her to continue working.  Because in France, actresses aren't forced into early retirement once they reach a certain age, no matter how talented or beautiful they still are.  But even if she retires tomorrow, Catherine Deneuve has had a full life.  She even got to dine with one of the Beatles.

And his daughter Stella. 😊