Catherine Deneuve: 50 years on film

Something must be wrong with the arithmetic. Fifty years in films? Catherine Deneuve? How could that be possible? And yet it is. The iconic French actress, still top of many people's lists of the most beautiful women in the world, made her first appearance in a movie in 1957. She was only 13 years old and nine years away from becoming a star - and a blonde.

Deneuve's half-century in the cinema is celebrated from today by an extensive festival at the Cinemathèque, the Parisian equivalent of the National Film Theatre. It is a career worth celebrating. Not many people can claim to have acted alongside Gene Kelly, Jack Lemmon, Johnny Hallyday, Yves Montand, Burt Reynolds and Björk.

At 63, Deneuve remains stunningly good-looking. She is one of the most popular people in France. She is one of the best known, most admired, French people in the world. A couple of years ago, she was included by an American film magazine among the 100 most important cinema figures of all time.

And yet Deneuve remains a rather elusive figure. Her private life escapes the zoom lenses of the "people" magazines. She has a reputation for being frosty and distant, like many of the roles that she plays on screen. Those who know her say that she is a warm, bubbly and approachable person, not at all "a star", or as the French now say, "un people".

Although she has one of the most instantly recognisable faces in the world, Deneuve often wanders alone around Paris flea markets. She is also notoriously scatty with money. She has tarnished her reputation in recent years by making public appearances for cash for doubtful causes and, on one occasion, forgetting to tell the tax man. She was forgiven by the authorities.

Although she has appeared in 99 movies (and is making the 100th), her memorable screen appearances can be counted on one hand, or maybe two. Her male equivalent as the "monstre sacré" of French cinema, Gérard Depardieu, makes a dozen films a year, of which one, or maybe two, are worthy of his talent. Deneuve makes a couple of films a year, none of which have been worthy of her for years.

You have to go back to 1991 - to Indochine, directed by Régis Wargnier - to find a Deneuve film that was both a critical and popular success. (The film won the Oscar for best foreign movie.) Deneuve gives a powerful, emotionally understated performance as a plantation owner in Vietnam's final years as a French colony.

"Depardieu makes too many movies. Deneuve makes too few. Rarely do either of them make movies that would stretch their abilities," said one French movie industry executive. "That may partly be the fault of the French cinema industry, for failing to use them properly. In Deneuve's case, I fear, it is partly a kind of mental laziness, or a lack of confidence in her own ability."

John Baxter, an acclaimed film writers who was born in Australia but is now based in France, says: "Everyone loves Catherine Deneuve. How could you not love Catherine Deneuve? But it is true that, unlike, say, a Jeanne Moreau, she has been unwilling to try riskier, more demanding roles as she has got older. She has been content to appear as the mother or the grandmother or the mother-in-law, always a wonderful presence on screen, and one of the great film faces, but never in a dangerous, intriguing or smouldering role."

Some critics suggest that Deneuve has simply recognised the limitations of her own talent.

Catherine Deneuve was born Catherine Fabienne Dorléac in Nazi-occupied Paris on 23 October 1943. Both her father, Maurice Dorléac and her mother, Renée Deneuve had acting careers. Catherine, though, had never intended to be an actress. She was drawn into the profession by her older sister, Françoise Dorléac. It was Françoise, not Catherine, who seemed destined to be one of the great French movie stars.

After a couple of child roles, the 16-year-old Deneuve agreed to make her first proper film, Les Portes Claquent, in 1960 - to take the role of her sister's sister. She adopted her mother's name, Deneuve, to distinguish herself from Françoise. In 1967, Françoise was killed in a road accident, aged 25.

Although Deneuve hates to talk about her private life or emotions, she has occasionally described her sister's early death as "the greatest tragedy" or the "most painful event" in her life.

In a diary published a couple of years ago, Catherine Deneuve said of Françoise, "she haunts me at night, always".

She has sometimes implied that Françoise was the only real actress in the family. Maybe that explains why she has been content, in her forties, fifties and sixties, to remain an "accidental" star, rather than usurp the memory of her actress sister.

But Deneuve had emerged as a great talent, and great beauty, before her sister's death.

The year before Françoise died, Catherine made two of her greatest movies. They are so absurdly different in tone and character that it is difficult to believe they were both made in 1966.

In Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, Catherine Deneuve, as a natural brunette, plays alongside her sister, Françoise and Gene Kelly in a sweet musical about innocent, twin French sisters in search of love and a good tune. In Belle de Jour - the film that made her an international star - Deneuve plays a wealthy, erotically driven woman who leads a secret life as a prostitute.

In a book published three years ago, A l'Ombre de Moi-Même (In My Own Shadow), Deneuve revealed that she had felt betrayed by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, after some of the nude scenes in the movie. "I was very exposed, in all senses of the word, and especially exposed physically, and I suffered terribly," she said. "I had the impression that I was more exposed than I had been led to believe There were moments when I had the impression of being simply exploited. I was quite unhappy."

Nonetheless, Belle de Jour, and another movie made by Buñuel, Tristana, are now counted by Deneuve as among her best films. Most critics would agree. Deneuve will appear at the Cinemathèque to introduce a showing of Tristana on Friday.

The other great influences on her early career - professionally and romantically - were the director and impresario Roger Vadim, and the film-critic turned director, François Truffaut.

Vadim had "discovered" Brigitte Bardot in the 1950s. He swept the young Deneuve off her feet in the early 1960s. They had a son together (Christian Vadim, an actor, now 43) and made a couple of forgettable movies. It was Truffaut, with whom Deneuve also had a long romantic entanglement, who pushed her to take more serious roles.

Deneuve also found time, amid all of this, to be swept off her feet by the British photographer David Bailey. They met at a nude photo shoot for Playboy in 1965 and married 15 days later. This was Deneuve's only marriage. They divorced in 1972.

A relationship in the 1970s with the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni resulted in Deneuve's second child, a daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, now 34 and also an actress.

In the late 1960s and in the mid-1970s, Deneuve tried to make it in Hollywood, not with enormous enthusiasm, judging by her published diaries. One entry dismisses Americans as "bizarre, indecent and obese, even the young ones". One American did meet her approval, however. She had a relationship with Burt Reynolds, her co-star in Hustle (1975), by far her best American movie, in which she again plays a prostitute.

John Baxter enthuses: "In that movie, Deneuve really shows her talent. She smoulders in this wonderfully controlled way. I defy anyone not to be moved by her in that film."

The Deneuve diaries of life on film-sets, published three years ago, were criticised as inconsequential. They include many banal episodes, such as the missing of planes and purchase of "charming" dustbins. However, they are strewn with clues about Deneuve's approach to acting and her buttoned-up personality. She reveals that she refuses to learn her lines thoroughly because she believes that she acts mechanically if she knows them too well. Some directors approve of this approach. Others are incandescent.

She also talks of the great burden she feels from her reputation, not only as a star but as one of the most beautiful women in the world. "That's an even heavier weight to carry," she says. "It falsifies all relationships."

In one of the few passages where she speaks about the art of the cinema, Deneuve suggests that the problems of the French movie industry - its difficulty in finding an audience abroad in recent years - come partly from its obsession with the idea of the director as the sole creative force, minimising the role of producers, script-writers and actors.

"That isolates [directors] too much. You can be the author and still agree to share, discuss, to criticise yourself, to go back on things... The French concept of the 'author's rights' in a movie puts the director in a position of too much solitude and demands an inhuman degree of excellence." Excellence - with a few exceptions, such as Indochine - has not characterised much of Deneuve's own work in the past 20 years.

One industry insider says that Deneuve has a reputation for being "not too bright... more a personality than an actor". This is almost certainly unfair. The performances extracted from her by Buñuel in the 1960s and by Truffaut in Le Dernier Métro in 1980 suggest that there is a great actress in there who occasionally comes out to play.

John Baxter says: "Yes, she is in a kind of comfort zone, but that is the way the French like her. They like her because she went away to America but came back to them and she is now part of the family, someone they recognise playing similar roles on screen and someone who does not seem too different to them off the screen."

There was certainly no national hue and cry against Deneuve a couple of years ago when she admitted taking cash to make public appearances with a doubtful Algerian businessman, Rafik Khalifa. There was nothing legally wrong in that, except Deneuve admitted that she had not declared the money to the tax authorities. She was also mildly criticised last year for accepting money to go to a festival in Carinthia, the Austrian province run by the ultra-nationalist, Jörg Haider.

Deneuve is notoriously naive with money. She told Le Monde this week that she has little to show for her long career as an icon of world cinema except her apartment on the Paris Left Bank and her house (and beloved garden) in Normandy.

The greater failure, perhaps, is her comfortable, latter-day acting career. Deneuve once said that Truffaut "used to push me a great deal, because he knew me privately... He always said that there was a Sleeping Beauty side to me, something that was ready to give but also refused to unbutton... Something that has to be unlocked."

Since Truffaut's death in 1984, few people have found the key to that lock.

Catherine the great: Deneuve's five finest roles

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) (1964)

Jacques Demy gave Deneuve her breakthrough role in this charmingly romantic film-opera. She plays Geneviève, a 17-year-old shopgirl who falls in love with Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo), a 20-year-old car mechanic. When she falls pregnant with Guy's child, she is forced to choose between waiting for him to return from military service in Algeria or accepting an offer of marriage from a wealthy diamond merchant.

Repulsion (1965)

Belle de Jour (1967)

Deneuve's best-known role. Soon after Repulsion, Luis Buñuel cast her as a beautiful and oppressed housewife, Séverine Serizy, who makes her daydreams of bondage and sadomasochism a reality when she secretly begins to work in a brothel, behind her unknowing husband's back.

Indochine (1992)

Perhaps Deneuve's most lauded role, garnering her an Oscar nomination and a César Award. Directed by Régis Wargnier, the film tells the torrid love story of Camille (Deneuve), a young Indochinese woman who rejects the husband chosen for her by her aristocratic family in favour of an older French naval officer, Jean Baptiste (Vincent Perez).

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

Keen to maintain her status as a darling of art-house cinema, Deneuve played Cvalda to Björk's Selma in Lars Von Trier's musical- drama film, the third in the controversial director's "Golden Heart Trilogy". This was another singing role for Deneuve, who also steals the show in François Ozon's funny, camp musical murder mystery 8 Women.

Alice Jones