Catherine Deneuve is seated on a sofa at the Dorchester hotel. She is wearing suede boots, thick patterned tights, a check skirt, black top and some very chunky jewellery — enormous ring, complicated bracelet with diamonds and a big brooch. Her thick blonde hair is swept back to form an impressive mane. She has a Louis Vuitton bag — a faded special edition with lettering by a New York artist — and bright red nails. Her face is strong and mobile and her body is sturdy. At 65, she is not, like so many grandes dames, starved to perfection. If you didn’t know who she was, you’d say she must be somebody. She has, in a word, presence. To be more exact, she has French presence.

“Yes, there is something very French about me, very individual, I’m very French,” she says. “I have the characteristics of the good and the bad manners of French people. The bad is impatience . . .” She looks for the right word. “Not impolite, but . . .”

“Haughty?” I suggest.

“Haughty? What is haughty? No, always in a hurry. Also the way I live, the way I talk, my individuality and my positions on a lot of things compared with what I am supposed to be.”

She is precise in her self-definitions. She is known in lazy journalese as the Ice Queen, a name that probably dates back to 1967 and her chilling performance as a housewife-turned-hooker in that immortal Buñuel film Belle de jour. But even this she disputes. “I was called Ice Queen many times after Belle de jour. It was very sexual, Belle de jour. It’s about a feminine fantasm of sexuality. You would imagine a woman who looked more sexual than I did in my stillness and coldness. No, not coldness — I’m cool, but I’m not cold, I don’t think so.”

This demonstrates two things. First, her pleasingly idiosyncratic English — one assumes “fantasm” is intended to be “fantasy”, but I still prefer “fantasm”.

Second, it shows her high seriousness about film. In an age when your average actor is contractually obliged to mouth inane nonsense about every movie they make or, like Kate Winslet at the Golden Globes, to wallow in emotionally induced aphasia, the cinephiliac, informed, thoughtful Deneuve is a howling gale of fresh air.

From the very beginning she has gone out of her way to work for the best directors. After a handful of small movies, her career took off in 1964 with Les Parapluies de Cherbourg by Jacques Demy, a film even more French than Deneuve, all the dialogue delivered as an operetta. Then, a young director’s dream, she alighted on Roman Polanski.

“Yes, yes, I pick directors more than parts. Polanski I chose. I wanted to work with him, I didn’t know much about him. He first proposed me a film in which I played the part of a stupid girl. I said, I’m not going to play that, and he said, all right, I’ll find you something else. And he came up with a script. It was called Angel Face, but then it was called Repulsion.” Deneuve played an endangered blonde, left alone in 1960s London, where her sexual confusion spills over into madness and nightmarish fantasies. Then, a few films later, came Belle de jour, a movie that did serious damage to one rather unbalanced student — me — in the Cambridge Arts Cinema. She found Buñuel difficult after Polanski. “I was quite young, and he didn’t speak much. I wasn’t allowed to see what we were shooting, and the producer was very much between the director and the actors. It was difficult, but, of course, I liked the film very much.”

Buñuel made it up to her by casting her in Tristana — a much more enjoyable experience. In it she plays the ward of an ageing aristocrat, whose free-thinking ideas she turns against him, abandoning him for her lover.

At this point, the movie god should have decreed she make a film with Hitchcock. It was meant to be — he had a dark and queasy fascination with icily perfect blondes; she understood film and, like Hitchcock, how to suggest more with less. But, somehow, even with the intervention some years later of yet another great director, François Truffaut, it never happened. It seems to remain a painful hole in her CV. “I was going to work with him; I should have worked with him. Truffaut organised lunch with him, but then Hitchcock died. We talked about a film, a thriller . . . I would have loved to work with him.”

All of which is to say, they don’t make them like Deneuve any more. She is the survivor of another cinematic age, when auteur directors — she, pleasingly, calls them “authors” — filled the art houses and inspired bad cases of Euro-envy in Hollywood. I mention Monica Bellucci as an example of an actress who should have been born 20 or 30 years earlier and worked for the great Italian directors. The Deneuve lips purse. “Er . . . yes. She does big films as a sort of character actor. She’s very beautiful, more like a beauty than an actor.”

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