Cannes Queen Catherine Deneuve on Life, Love and Still Going Strong

Catherine Deneuve attends the 'Beating Hearts' Red Carpet at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on May 23, 2024.

Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

Catherine Deneuve, of course, brings her dog.

Jack — “not Jacques, Jack!” — a pointy-eared Shiba Inu, stands at attention throughout the interview, his eyes fixed on her like a discreet, furry security guard.

“I usually have him on set with me,” she says, patting his head. “He is always very good.”

We’re tucked into a cozy corner of a boutique Left Bank hotel. Deneuve’s tasteful Louis Vuitton handbag is tossed on the chaise lounge. As we chat, she punctuates her answers with the occasional puff from her vape — “I did quit smoking for a while, even did hypnosis, but I started again,” she says, waving the vape. “This, however, is not smoking. It’s nothing.”

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It’s 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’s face was used as the image of Marianne, the French national emblem of liberty and reason. She is, de facto, an icon.

Deneuve’s onscreen persona is simultaneously that of sweet Geneviève, romantic idealism personified, in Jacques Demy’s magical 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; and Carole Ledoux, the Belgian girl in London whose sexual repression turns homicidal in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). She’s Séverine, haute-bourgeois housewife who moonlights as an S&M submissive in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967); and the camp star who sends up her own iconography in both Tony Scott’s lesbian vampire thriller The Hunger (1983) and François Ozon’s murder mystery musical 8 Women (2002).

At 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’s the legend.

Deneuve returns to Cannes not as a retrospective figure but as a working actor. She has two films in official competition: 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 Léa Seydoux in Gentle Monster, from Austrian director Marie Kreutzer (Corsage). “Oh, they are very small roles,” she says modestly. “But even a small role must be necessary. When a role is small, I always ask myself: ‘If this character were removed from the script, would it matter?’ If not, then it isn’t very interesting. I’m 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.”

But Cannes is more than a current stop on the circuit for Deneuve — it is the throughline of her career, the stage on which her legend was first forged.

Deneuve’s Cannes story began with a coronation. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, her first lead role, won the Palme d’Or and transformed the 20-year-old ingenue into an international star.

“We 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,” she recalls. “But it was the beginning of my career, and everything was new. Even winning [the Palme d’Or] felt unreal because I didn’t fully understand it yet. The moment I especially remember from Cannes is when [Lars von Trier’s] Dancer in the Dark won the Palme d’Or [in 2000]. That recognition, that stayed with me.”

From left: Lars Von Trier, Catherine Deneuve, and Bjork at the ‘Dancer In The Dark’ premiere at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival in 2000.

FocKan/WireImage

Between Umbrellas and Dancer — two musicals at opposite poles of the joy-to-anguish spectrum — 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’s Palme d’Or pick was Pulp Fiction. Deneuve handed the trophy to Quentin Tarantino, anointing a new generation of indie cinema — a choice that would prove