Catherine Deneuve

Catherine Deneuve — Biography

Catherine Fabienne Dorléac, professionally known as Catherine Deneuve, was born on 22 October 1943 in the 17th arrondissement of Paris and has worked as a French actress, producer, singer and model. She grew up in a theatrical household: her father Maurice Dorléac was an actor, her mother was Renée Simonot, and her elder sister Françoise Dorléac also pursued acting. Across a career lasting close to seventy years she has embodied well over a hundred characters and is counted among the greatest European screen actresses; The New York Times placed her among the finest actors of the 21st century in 2020.

Her screen career began in 1957, when she was thirteen, in a picture that had actually been filmed a year earlier, while she was still twelve. As a prominent figure of the French New Wave she rose, alongside Brigitte Bardot and Alain Delon, to become one of the most celebrated French artists on the planet. Worldwide stardom came in 1964 with Jacques Demy's musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Subsequent roles in The Young Girls of Rochefort, Donkey Skin, 8 Women and The Beloved confirmed her as one of the defining faces of the film musical.

In her early years she earned praise for playing detached, enigmatic, coolly beautiful women. The most celebrated works from that phase are Roman Polanski's Repulsion together with Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour and Tristana. Directors such as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda and André Téchiné returned to collaborate with her again and again over the decades.

Her work carried her onto sets in many countries: she performed for Robert Aldrich and Tony Scott in the United States, for Marco Ferreri and Dino Risi in Italy, for Manoel de Oliveira in Portugal and for Lars von Trier in Denmark. Her performance in Truffaut's The Last Metro won her the César Award for Best Actress, an honour she collected twice in the course of her career. She starred in von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, received an Academy Award nomination for Indochine and a BAFTA nomination for Belle de Jour, and lifted the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival for Place Vendôme. Audiences in the English-speaking world remember her above all for The Hunger.

Among her honorary distinctions are the Honorary Golden Bear awarded by the Berlin Film Festival in 1998, the Honorary Palme d'Or presented at Cannes in 2005 and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement bestowed at Venice in 2022. She has additionally taken home the European Film Award for Best Actress, the Donostia Award of the San Sebastián Film Festival and the Praemium Imperiale. Her films have sold nearly 99 million cinema tickets in France, which makes her the active actress with the biggest theatrical audience in her country. In 1985 she took over from Mireille Mathieu as the official face of Marianne, the French Republic's emblem of liberty, and beyond the cinema she walked the runway for Yves Saint Laurent.

In her private life, her partnership with director Roger Vadim gave her a son, Christian Vadim, and her relationship with the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni a daughter, Chiara Mastroianni; she was married to the photographer David Bailey. She has also pursued singing, releasing the album Souviens-toi de m'oublier in 1981.