Catherine Deneuve is 64 in October and hardly desperate to deny it. As she
dryly points out, “there’s not much point. It’s on record.” Dressed in an
old green Prada tie-dye effect sweater, camel corduroy trouser suit, a Fendi
wicker and tan leather bag, loafers, tinted spectacles and a perpetual
wreath of cigarette smoke, she is still arrestingly, uncannily beautiful.
Not the waif she was in those early films (that would be a bit creepy) but the
legs are still good, the features fine and the artfully layered hair
luxuriant, though not the flaxen blonde it was in the 1960s and 1970s (that
would be creepy, too). I’ve heard rumours of surgery, but can’t detect the
frozen wastes of Botox and she seems nonplussed by the suggestion.
“Actresses have to be able to frown.”
She prefers vitamin injections and twice monthly visits to Françoise Morice, a
facial masseuse at the Institut de Beauté in Rue François 1er, Paris. Apart
from that she swears by fresh air (she spends weekends at her house in
Normandy, gardening and walking), does Pilates, eats carefully (although
she’s wolfing more of those biscuits than I am but then I don’t suppose the
French do wheat intolerance) and mostly avoids the sun. And, yes, she knows
that smoking is not ideal, but she tries not to inhale too much.
Why Deneuve didn’t go the way of Elizabeth Taylor or even Julie Christie, who
has admitted having a facelift and to hating the ageing process, is
debatable. She attributes it to her mother, Renée Deneuve, an actress, who
is still alive at 96 “and amazing. Her energy is something I’ve been blessed
with – so, on the whole, I’m not frightened of ageing.” She was, she says,
aware of her exceptional looks early on and talks about them with enviable
dispassion. “Being one of four sisters, all pretty, with a good-looking
mother meant we had more impact than if just one of us had been beautiful.”
Being in demand professionally must help. Remarkably, the work never dried up,
although critics have argued that much of it has been unworthy of her. One
suggested she lacked confidence. “Probably a good thing,” she retorts,
“given how narcissistic actors can be.” She has just finished recording the
English language voiceover for Persepolis, a black and white animated film
about the Iranian revolution, in which her daughter by Marcello Mastroianni,
Chiara Mastroianni, also stars and which took the Prix du Jury at this
year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Her presence at fashion shows is as sought-after as ever. Wisely, she is
stinting with that particular benediction, confining it to just a few
favoured designers such as Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, Stefano Pilati at Yves
Saint Laurent and Louis Vuitton. And she adores what Bruno Frisoni has been
doing with those Roger Vivier buckled shoes that she wore in Belle de Jour.
But it was the original, troubled genius at Yves Saint Laurent with whom she
is indelibly linked.
She was introduced to him by David Bailey. She wore a red and white YSL when
she met the Queen in London, and chose him to dress her in Belle de Jour.
“I think I knew even then that there was something subversive about those
impeccable designs, which suits the film perfectly.” Like Hepburn and
Givenchy, theirs was one of the great artistic fashion-film alliances. YSL’s
stylish carapaces (and his decision, against Deneuve’s instinct for
miniskirts, to keep the skirts and dresses knee-length) helped to make the
film both unforgettable and timeless.
Previously, Deneuve has alluded to the burden of always being photographed and
of always having to live up to a 40-year-old image. But to-day, sipping
endless espressos (probably not a good beauty idea either) and elegant in a
large armchair (we are in the Latin quarter in an airy salon above a cinema
that she helped to design), she seems insouciant.
“You catch me on a good day,” she shrugs. “I’ve just come back from a week
sailing, swimming, diving. I feel very relaxed. I’m even a little brown. I
wouldn’t normally take the sun, but for a week I wanted to live like that.”
She flips a leg over the arm of a chair and I can see the ice queen is
wearing a jewelled ankle chain.
Why am I talking to the woman that the film writer David Thomson calls
“perhaps the greatest cool blonde, forever hinting at intimations of
depravity”, about being a role model for older women, when she has an oeuvre
of more than 100 films and almost 50 years of acting history behind her?
Partly, because her people had said that was all she would agree to discuss –
that and her involvement with Al Gore’s Climate Project, to which she
donated part of the fee she received for the latest Louis Vuitton ad
campaign. She’s in good company: Mikhail Gorbachev is in one of the others
and Annie Leibovitz took the pictures – which may have been part of the
bait: “Annie is so fast and so good – she cuts down that awful
process, increasingly the case at my age, where the good photographs are far
outweighed by the bad and you feel you have no control.” She is amused to
hear about the fracas in Britain over Leibovitz’s misrepresented encounter
with the Queen.
Given the interview vetting, it’s rather disconcerting that Deneuve has
arrived on time without an entourage, announcing that she doesn’t wish to
discuss climate change. “Why would anyone care what I’ve got to say about
politics? What can I say that people don’t already know?”
For the record, she’s sceptical about being an older role model, too. Much as
she admires Vuitton and particularly what Marc Jacobs has done there, she’s
not convinced that attitudes in the fashion world have significantly changed
in favour of older women. “I don’t think Vuitton would have chosen me to
star in a fashion campaign – this one is slightly different.” But there
does seem to be a move towards adulating more mature women, I suggest. The
original supermodels are all working again; Sharon Stone has done ads for
Dior. “But Sharon Stone is only 49.”
I don’t think Deneuve’s reputation for froideur is based solely on
her performance in Belle de Jour. In her 2005 autobiography Close Up and
Personal, she concedes that she’s had her moments, some perhaps aggravated
by the depression from which she has periodically suffered. Not that she
goes into much detail. “Marvellously opaque” is the press quote on its cover –
the cover! But being opaque is a large part of why she’s such a legend. It’s
no coincidence that although her contribution to Belle de Jour was initially
deemed inadequately blank it turned out to be exquisitely judged.
That fetishistically pale Hitchcockian hair, allied with the whey-coloured
skin and inscrutably regular features are the other reason she has always
seemedm slightly other-worldly. “Oh, that blonde,” she says. “What a bore it
was. And, oh God, the upkeep – I had to have it peroxided every week
[she is a natural brunette] and it had to be blow-dried all the time.” She
dyed it to please Roger Vadim, the director with whom she moved in when she
was 17. “Well, no one’s perfect,” she remarks dryly. “Actually he never
directly told me to. But back then, I was probably preempting what men
wanted. Now you can be what they call a dirty blonde. I like that.”
Ah yes, Vadim, by whom she had a son, Christian, when she was 20. She and
Vadim parted not long after (perhaps that’s why she was back at work filming Les
Parapluies de Cherbourg two months after the birth) and Vadim pitched up
with Jane Fonda. Then there was Bailey, who shot her for Playboy yet,
despite that, managed to marry her – the only time she succumbed to the
institution. Mick Jagger was the best man.
There followed an affair with Marcello Mastroianni (her co-star in A Slightly
Pregnant Man), and then a Hollywood fling with Burt Reynolds. Although
Mastroianni remained married to his wife, Deneuve was at his side when he
died in 1996.
In 1973 she signed the Manifeste des 343 Salopes (the Manifesto of 343 Sluts)
against antiabortion legislation, a brave admission that she had had an
abortion. “Yes it was brave,” she says.
Her life has been far from conventional and not without its tragedies either.
In 1967, her sister Françoise Dorléac, also an actress and to whom she was
very close, was burnt alive in a car accident; she regrets not having been
more mindful of money and I think deep down she was troubled by her
experiences on Belle de Jour.
“I felt very exposed, in every sense of the word, but very exposed
physically,” she wrote in her autobiography, “which caused me a lot of
distress.”
But not today; she is happy that she has three grandchildren, plenty of work,
a lover (“it’s very hard to be on your own”), and happy that she can walk
around the streets near the flat in Saint-Sulpice where she has lived for 25
years, largely unencumbered by paps. She is especially thrilled by the tiny
coffee spoons she has sourced for the salon. “Normally coffee spoons are so
big, don’t you find?”
I’d been so busy mulling over David Thomson’s quote about her hints of
depravity that I hadn’t noticed the spoons. “Did he really say that?” she
says, throwing back her head and laughing. “Those were the days.”
louisvuitton.com
