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. 😊 

Paul Simon At Eighty

If Bob Dylan is rock's surrealist singer-songwriter, Paul Simon is its middle-class intellectual bard.

Paul Simon, who turns eighty today, is a studious thinker who observes the world around him and delves into the meanings of everything from the most mundane to the most profound.  He's famous for analyzing and probing the subject matter of his songs and coming up with novel interpretations from his own unique perspective.  His songs have long connected the outside world to his personal thoughts and feelings, from his take on our inability to connect with one another in "The Sound of Silence" and the rootless of the touring musician in "Homeward Bound," two of his songs from his partnership with Art Garfunkel, to his ruminations on death from "Mother and Child Reunion" (the title of which was inspired by the name of a chicken and egg meal) to creeping middle age in "Still Crazy After All These Years."

Simon's intellectual curiosity led to his exploration of various cultures in his music from gospel and Latin music to the sounds of South African street music and the rhythms of Brazil.  Always searching, never staying still, perpetually self-aware as well as looking at the rest of us, Simon has created fresh music well into his later years, and he's remained just as relevant as he was in the then-burgeoning urban folk scene of the early sixties.  If he had remained in that old-school coffeehouse culture, Simon would have still made compelling music, but it wouldn't nearly be as interesting.  Paul Simon's greatest talent is his ability to always express himself in new and fresh ways.   

Dylan at Eighty

I don't know if I can say much about Bob Dylan, who turns eight years old today, that hasn't already been said.

Called by one critic "the greatest rock and roll songwriter who isn't Chuck Berry or Smokey Robinson," Bob Dylan has written strong, clever, surrealistic songs about pretty much everything, with allusions to American history and culture, a dose of social, and a bit of absurdity.  Even if you know what his songs are about, you don't know what they mean.  Songs such as "Ballad of Thin Man," about a paranoid reporter at a circus sideshow, offered various interpretations centered around the straight man in a world he doesn't understand, but who really knows who Mr. Jones is or what he stands for?  Other songs like "Maggie's Farm," about nonconformity, took on whole new meanings in later years, such as in Britain where it became an anti-Thatcher rallying cry.  And only now can we figure out a modicum of meaning in "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" when we realize that our current Postmaster General has stolen the Post Office and locked the mailboxes. And with the specter of Donald Trump being President again, we have to ask, just what do we have to pay to get out of going through all of these things twice?

Of course, his protest songs "Masters of War " and "Blowin' In the Wind" are evergreen, and "Like a Rolling Stone" is probably the greatest rock and roll song ever, with its sense of protest and put-down.  And you'll probably learn more about relationships in listening to his 1975 album Blood On the Tracks than from anywhere else: Dylan's son Jakob describes the album as a document of his parents arguing.

It remains to be seen whether Dylan has one more trick up his sleeve after defying expectations for sixty years.  But it should be obvious that whatever he pulls next, it's going to be something we don't expect.  Happy birthday, Bob. 😊

Ringo At Eighty

And now, to a real musician . . .

Ringo Starr, the older of the two surviving Beatles, is eighty years old today, and he's still active.  One would have thought he would be retired by now, since he hasn't had a hit single since the early eighties and because he's never been as consistent in his songwriting as the other Beatles.  But he sings better than most people give him credit for, and more importantly, he's the consummate entertainer, always delivering songs with a smile in his voice and a twinkle in his eye.  His own acknowledgment of his ordinariness - "What's a skinny little scruff like me doing in a band like this?", he famously asked when in the Beatles - is what made him a legend.  It's his ability to not take himself to seriously that gave him his longevity.

In previous years, Ringo has celebrated his birthday the same way.  Wherever happens to be, he counts down to twelve o'clock noon and, with those in his company, calls out "Peace and Love," a mantra mantle he inherited from John Lennon.  This time, though, ihanks to COVID-19, he will be having a virtual concert at 8 PM Eastern Tie and be joined by Paul McCartney, along with a little help form his other friends - Joe Walsh, Ben Harper, Sheryl Crow, Gary Clark Jr and Sheila E - t oraise money for four causes (Black Lives Matter, The David Lynch Foundation, MusiCares and WaterAid). While Ringo probably won't record another album again (thigh he has hinted at an extended player), he may yet still perform with his All-Starr Band (whose lineup consists of whoever happens to be in the room, or these days, on Zoom at the time) when the pandemic is over, which means we could still see him on stage in 2021.  Or 2022.  Let's hope so.  We need him to stick around and stay healthy for as long as he can and keep making us smile.

Rock on, Ringo  Rock on.