A woman has to be intelligent, have charm, a sense of humor, and be kind. It’s the same qualities I require from a man.
Catherine Deneuve Quotes
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| Birth: | 22nd October, 1943 |
| Nationality: | French |
| Profession: | Actress |
About
Deneuve was born Catherine Fabienne Dorléac in occupied Paris to French stage and screen actor Maurice Dorléac and actress Renée Deneuve (born 1912). Deneuve attended Catholic schools.
As Catherine Dorléac, she made her film debut at age eleven in Les Collégiennes (1957), filmed in 1955 but not released until two years later. Deneuve subsequently began using her mother's surname professionally in order to differentiate herself from her elder sister, Françoise Dorléac, who was using their father's name.
The film that brought her stardom was Jacques Demy's 1964 musical Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. She made two more films with Demy, most notably another musical, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), with Dorléac – who was killed in a car accident the following year – as her twin sister. Further prominent films from this early time in her career included Roman Polanski's suspense classic Repulsion (1965); Jean-Paul Rappeneau's La Vie de château (1966), which employed her underused comic skills; and Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967) – as the haut-bourgeois housewife who achieves sexual satisfaction working in a Parisian brothel. In the Polanski film, Deneuve first portrayed the character archetype for which she would be nicknamed the "ice maiden". Her work for Buñuel would be her most famous. Her screen persona as "a cold, remote erotic object which dreams are made on" reached a peak, according to the critic Philip French, in her second Buñuel film Tristana (1970). Though always prolific in European films, Deneuve limited appearances in American films. Her first two American films were The April Fools (1969), a romantic comedy with Jack Lemmon, and Hustle (1975), a crime drama with Burt Reynolds.
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