Smash hit

I protest — I once interviewed Bellucci. The memory of her showstopping presence still haunts me — and Deneuve relents slightly. “Yes, yes, she is very good. But you can also decide to work with ‘authors’ rather than big productions. It’s a matter of choice — given the opportunity to work in big American productions, it’s difficult to say no.”

Didn’t she ever consider spending more time in Hollywood? At this, she becomes the word she doesn’t understand — haughty.

“Why should I go to the States to do a film I wouldn’t consider in Europe, just because it’s English-speaking?” Quite.

There was also an age when French stars — Charles Boyer, Louis Jourdan, Maurice Chevalier — could easily find themselves cast in big American movies, and Carlo Ponti could sweep into Hollywood with Sophia Loren on his arm.

“It’s another time. Films are now much closer to reality. Hollywood was already changing when I went there in 1968. I love American directors. I would love to work for Coppola or Scorsese. But they don’t need European actresses.”

Never mind. In the course of her career of more than 100 films, she never stopped working with the best, though she has done plenty of what she calls “commercial” films. We’re at the Dorchester because she’s promoting a work with another grand French “author” — Arnaud Desplechin, the French Wes Anderson. Like Anderson in The Royal Tenenbaums or The Darjeeling Limited, Desplechin plays with the dynamics of small, close groups of people, allowing their stories to unfold, apparently randomly. A Christmas Tale is a long family-reunion saga in which Deneuve plays — radiant, cool not cold — a matriarch dying of cancer, with whom she seems to identify.

“She’s not dying! I think she’s very alive, I don’t think she’s going to die, she’s too strong to die.”

The film also stars Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter Deneuve had with Marcello Mastroianni, Fellini’s male muse, if there is such a thing. She had a son, Christian Vadim, with the director Roger Vadim. Her one marriage — to the supreme snapper of the Sixties and beyond, David Bailey — lasted seven years and was childless. Trust Bailey to find the supreme visual incarnation of an age and marry it.

Outside film, she has been somewhat politically active, most notably signing the Manifeste des 343 salopes — Manifesto of 343 Bitches — in 1971. All the signatories were admitting to illegal abortions in an attempt to reform French law. But, though subversion in art may be her style, dissidence in life isn’t. In the late 1980s her face became Marianne, the national symbol of France, the post-revolutionary image of freedom and reason.

“It was funny to be chosen as Marianne. People say I am very cool and my personal life was very agitated . . .” Lovely word. “I had a child when I wasn’t married and quite young, then I was married and had a child with another man. It’s not what people think of Marianne. But I’m a different mixture of what makes me very French, very individual. I like Marianne, she’s the symbol of the republic. I wouldn’t have accepted another kind of symbol.”

Her personal life has recently been nastily raked over in a book called Deneuve, The Free Woman, by Bernard Violet. It accuses her of all sorts of low skulduggery and her father of collaborating with the Nazis. Her father is dead, so beyond the protection of French libel laws. Her mother, however, is not.

“I’m going to sue the editor and then, maybe, the author. It’s been a big shock to my family. It was so upsetting to my mother, I am going to sue. I have the book, but I decided I wouldn’t read it, it would be too upsetting. Other members of my family have read it and told me how terrible it is. The author is a very perverted person. He’s done the same thing to Alain Delon and Gérard Depardieu. None of it is true.”

Meanwhile, she works on: two more films are about to come out and she starts another in the spring. She still chooses directors rather than scripts, but she is aware that, at 65, she cannot expect to have such freedom for that much longer. When will she stop?

“When I have the impression that the characters I’m offered are not interesting any more. As long as I have the impression that I can do things that interest me — it’s very selfish, very, very selfish. But you see, I’ve been doing it all my life, it’s not such an easy thing to consider, to stop. No, it’s true, you know I started working very young.” Is she frightened of stopping? “No, it’s not that, it’s just that I’m a very active person, you know. Still, I enjoy going to the cinema, being among people in film — I have a lot of friends who write, authors, technicians. I’m very much into it, still. If you are not any more in that activity, then you are on the other side, it’s like retiring. You can have a lot of interest in life, do what you like to do, but then it’s another relation you have to people, because you are not in the move of making things, you know . . .”

She lives in Paris and just outside, and, when outside, she gardens. She looks ruefully at the state of her fingers and nails when I ask her about this.

Coppola and Scorsese are fools not to hire her, as is Almodovar.

“I’d love to work with him, but don’t see why he would take me, he has all he needs at home.”

They’re all fools because she, more than any other living actor, embodies their art. Simple as that. I turn off my recorders, and then, in an instant, I lose my heart. She points at my feet. I am wearing a pair of Luccheses, cowboy boots bought in Austin, Texas.

“I love your boots!” she cries. She has three pairs of her own.

What’s not to love?

www.bryanappleyard.com

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010