Catherine Deneuve
The French actress has been a sensual star since the 1960s
She’s a classic French beauty who always seems to be harboring a dark secret. That is the essence of Catherine Deneuve. As French director Andre Téchiné, who has worked with Deneuve on seven films, put it, “Catherine has a hidden side, like a Hitchcock actor, like Cary Grant. We never know what she’s thinking. That’s the mystery of her greatness, and her eroticism.”
Famed surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel showcased Deneuve’s eroticism in the 1967 film Belle de Jour—in which Deneuve plays a Parisian housewife who finally gets to live out her sadomasochistic fantasies as a prostitute at an upscale brothel. Deneuve’s performance in Belle—both in the fantasy sequences when she’s being whipped, raped and pelted with mud as well as in the whorehouse bed—radiates lust, titillation and orgasmic satisfaction. Her character also has an ongoing flirtation with the brothel’s madame, which marks the beginning of Deneuve’s status as an icon within the lesbian community, capped off by her tryst with Susan Sarandon in the 1983 vampire movie, The Hunger.
Deneuve’s innate sensuousness became her hallmark in films like Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. “Being an actress is a very physical thing. If I didn’t look the way I looked, I would never have started in films,” said Deneuve, who maintains that she’s always made a personal connection to even her most sexually risqué roles. “I’m always myself, at the core of the character. It’s a separate reality, but it’s never disconnected from me.”
Her alluring mystique also transcended film. She was a muse to fashion legend Yves Saint Laurent and became the face of L’Oréal and Chanel No. 5 perfume, thus securing her place in history—as The New York Times once put it—as “the seductress of her generation.”
