Biography of Catherine Deneuve

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Catherine Fabienne Deneuve was born October 22, 1943 in Paris, France, to actor parents Renée Simonot and Maurice Dorlac. She made her movie debut in 1957, when she was barely a teenager and continued with small parts in minor films, until Roger Vadim gave her a meatier role in Vice and Virtue.

Her breakthrough came with the excellent musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , in which she gave an unforgettable performance as a romantic middle-class girl who falls in love with a young soldier but gets imprisoned in a loveless marriage with another man; the director was the gifted Jacques Demy, who also cast Deneuve in the less successful The Young Girls of Rochefort.

She then played a schizophrenic killer in Roman Polanski's Repulsion and a married woman who works as a part-time prostitute every afternoon in Luis Butuel's masterpiece Belle de Jour . She also worked with Butuel in Tristana and gave a great performance for Francois Truffaut in Mississippi Mermaid , a kind of apotheosis of her "frigid femme fatale" persona.

In the seventies she didn't find parts of that caliber, but her magnificent work in Truffaut's The Last Metro as a stage actress in Nazi-occupied Paris revived her career. She was also very good in the epic drama Indochine , for which she earned her first Academy Award nomination . Although the elegant and always radiant Deneuve has never appeared on stage, she is universally hailed as one of the "grandes dames" of French cinema, joining a list that includes such illustrious talents as Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau, Isabelle Huppert, Isabelle Adjani and the younger Juliette Binoche.