Catherine Deneuve — The Most Beautiful Woman in the World? (1975) 🇨🇦
Nobody knows who elected French star Catherine Deneuve “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman,” but the billing is attached to her name whenever in print.
Every man to his own taste, but Deneuve definitely deserves a spot on everybody’s Top Ten. If you don’t believe it, take another look at the glamourous, classically beautiful blond promoting Chanel Number Five perfume in those omnipresent TV commercials. That’s Deneuve.
“Being the most beautiful woman in the world is a very uncomfortable thing for me. I’d much rather be one of the most beautiful”, sighs Deneuve. “It is the American press that has labeled me ‘the most beautiful’. No one in France has ever said such a thing to me. Of course, better than being told ‘you look a mess today’ and its always nice to hear that one’s looks are appreciated, but it is distasteful to me to make so much out of something that is only skin deep. In 20 years, they’ll be calling me ‘the most beautiful grandmother and after that they’ll just see pictures of me and say ‘what a great beauty she was!’”
“I have no image of myself to live up to,” claims Deneuve. “I became a star by accident. My sister convinced a producer | should play her younger sister in a movie she was starring”. Her sister, the equally beautiful Françoise Dorléac was killed a few years ago in an automobile accident.
“I was terribly shy and had no idea I’d become a star. It was no big plan. It just happened.”
And now France’s top screen actress brings her legendary beauty to the role of Nicole Britton, in Robert Aldrich’s “Hustle.” Burt Reynolds is the latest male star to appear opposite this native Parisienne, whose leading men have included Omar Sharif, Marcello Mastroianni and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Director Roger Vadim made her a star at the age of 18 in his “Vice and Virtue.” Director Jacques Demy tinged her fragile beauty with sweetness for his masterwork “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” which won her the Best Actress Award at Cannes.
In the title role of director Luis Bunnel’s [Luis Buñuel] “Belle de Jour,” one of her greatest successes, Deneuve played a bourgeois wife who whiles away her afternoons in a bordello.
Roman Polanski cast her as a homicidal maniac in “Repulsion” — evidently an ultimate, as she vowed never again to portray a character so shocking.
Now after some 30 films Deneuve is conceded to be ‘the most successful French film actress of her generation’, but not without developing some very strong opinions about both, her craft and her lifestyle.
“My face doesn’t move like that of many actors, through the whole gamut of emotions. I don’t like that type of acting. If you speak of the greatest cinema actors, who are they? Henry Fonda, Cary Grant, Greta Garbo. Not people with a wide range of expressions, but actors whose main quality is what looks like complete ease of movement. By natural inclination, I’ve never been drawn toward people, toward men who wear their program on their faces. I need more ambiguity.”
“I hate what’s too quick, too bare, too uniform in our era. And about tomorrow I have no excitement. Merely, as Jean Cocteau used to say, a curiosity. I don’t feel young any longer. So much has happened to me between the ages of 17 and 22. I’m 31. It bears something definite about it. More than a quarter of a century. What frightens me is to find myself, all of a sudden, with life leaking through my fingers.”
“I used to go out a lot. I used to love the night, to dance and see lots of people. Now I can no longer do it. I’m afraid of the night. I have such anguishes, such moments of distress when the day turns into night, and deep at night, also. What I love best is my house; it’s where I feel most protected. I love having a few friends for dinner and cooking a special dinner for them. I can no longer be with strangers. If I stay in a hotel, I always prefer a room to a suite to avoid having strangers around. Come to think of it, the only moment of my life I felt everything in and around me was normal, everything was like I thought life should be, was when I was pregnant.”
“People say I’m against marriage. Obviously all this has nothing to do with being for or against marriage. The fact is I married David Bailey — because I was madly in love with him. I was convinced our marriage could last. It wasn’t too much separation that undid it; in three years we probably spent an average of three days a week entirely together. Deeper reasons ruined our marriage and it came to me as a shock to discover how easy it is to say, ‘I’m divorcing you.’
“A woman has three security valves; a man, a child, a job; in my code it stands in that order, yet in my real life, the order is reversed. Also, I believe that only a man with whom I would like to make a couple should be able to calm my anguishes, my distresses; yet in real life it’s my work that does that. I hate to admit all these contradictions in myself; that’s why I’m really allergic to interviews.”
“I’m very much for maintaining a certain distance, a certain formality between me and others — even people I really love. I adore my parents, it’s a real relationship, yet I was never intimate with them. The only human being I could ever tell everything was my sister Francoise. She and I were so diametrically different; put together we would have been a fantastic woman.”
“l’m not easily involved in anything. I’m totally pessimistic. There’s no better world after death, not for me. It’s tough on earth, that’s all I believe in. Life is a jungle. You eat or get eaten. Passion is the only way out. For me, the greatest luxury on earth would be to be able to abandon myself to passion.”
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- “It is distasteful to me to make so much out of something that is only skin deep.”
- The bourgeois wife in Belle de Jour.
- With Omar Sharif in “Mayerling”.
- François Truffaut directing Catherine in “Mississippi Mermaid.”
- Catherine [Catherine Deneuve] and her sister Françoise Dorléac in “The Young Girls of Rochefort.”
Collection: Showbill Magazine, Winter 1975