Style with substance

She is capable of elevating even the most ridiculous material; a campy, vampy turn as a lesbian Dracula in Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), brought her close to becoming the brand name for a new lesbian magazine - until her swift court case scotched the plan. In short, 60-year-old Deneuve is more than just a celebrated actress, she is an institution.

But the publication of a fragmented diary has caused tremors at the institution’s foundations. Deneuve probably intended A L’ombre de Moi-meme (In My Shadow), a collection of personal thoughts from the sets of her films, to be a mere bagatelle, an amuse-bouche for a curious reader. She cautions as much from the start when she warns: "Get ready for very little." Yet the lack of substance has induced some sort of national nervous breakdown, with early reviews dismayed by doodling entries that cover a missed flight, a rummage through a litter bin, a pensee on the importance of champagne that "doesn’t resemble pee and has bubbles" and an observation that New Yorkers on Broadway are "bizarre people, indecent and obese".

The French like their literature to resemble their cassoulet - thick as a brick, and somewhat indigestible. Thus Deneuve’s light low-cal musings have been found wanting, and her sternest critics are calling for a reassessment of Deneuve’s iconic status; is Deneuve really the ultimate symbol of cool French intelligence and beauty, or just a silly self-obsessed fashionista who is only interested in la vie en clothes?

This kind of disenchantment is almost unheard of in Britain, where we fully expect our heroes to show off their feet of clay and cheer up the nation - for an example of this, you need look no further than the public jollity that has greeted the Beckham affair, nicely timed for our Easter holidays.

In France, however, there is an obsession with cool, and Deneuve was its epitome, described by the director Luis Buuel as "seductive as sin and as cold as virtue". When she became an international sensation at 20, in 1964, with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, French movies at the time were a byword for sexiness but Deneuve was never Bardot’s kind of scantily clad, pouting pin-up. Even in her early films she encapsulated aloof, high-maintenance chic. She might have gone on to utilise this durable dignity in the service of sentimental, regal roles, but her career has revealed her to be much more interesting. Soon she was the object of desire for filmmakers like Polanski and Buuel; the characters they imagined for her teeming with hidden, darker passions, in particular Buuel’s groundbreaking Belle de Jour, in which she played a blank, upper-class Parisian housewife who spends her afternoons as a prostitute.

Her initial approach to the business of acting was rather semi-detached. The third of four daughters born to a pair of stage actors, Maurice Dorleac and Renee Deneuve, the Dorleac family divided its time between an apartment in Paris’s 16th Arrondissement and a country house, and Deneuve attended private Catholic schools like many a Parisian student. Her half-hearted foray into acting, made when she was just 13, a role in the film, Les Collegiens, was largely the result of Deneuve’s following in the path of her older sister Francoise, who was determined to become an actress like her parents and with whom Deneuve was very close.

"I was too young," says Deneuve, who took her mother’s maiden name as her professional name. "I didn’t think acting was for me because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. My sister was older and she was an actress, but I was much more into dreaming about things."

The two sisters made several films together after their debut in the low-budget film Le Portes Cloquent in 1960. The two couldn’t have been more different. Deneuve’s reserve contrasted with Dorleac’s joie de vivre. Deneuve envied the mobility of her sister’s face; Dorleac, less physically perfect, had a complex about being ‘asymmetrical’.

It wasn’t until Deneuve met director Jacques Demy and was cast as the heroine of his 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg that the younger sister became famous - she won the best actress award at Cannes that year - and began to take herself seriously as an actress. It was also with Demy that Deneuve made her last film with Francoise, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, in 1966. The film was not a success and Dorleac was killed in a car accident just a few months after its completion - a seminal event for the 24-year-old Deneuve. Almost 40 years later, she still finds the death of her sister hard to talk about. "I miss the shoulder to lean on," she said recently.

While the French have long regarded Deneuve externally as the image of perfection, they have chosen to overlook the turbulence of a non-traditional private life. When she was 17, Deneuve met Roger Vadim, already a well-known director, with whom she made two films and had her son, Christian, in 1962. Despite social pressure, Deneuve refused to marry the director but she did marry photographer David Bailey two weeks after they met. The bride wore black and her husband later jauntily characterised their seven year marriage as "like trying to manage a Maserati when you’re used to a Ford". They divorced in 1972, the same year that she gave birth to her daughter. Italian star Marcello Mastroianni was the father.

Both Christian Vadim and Chiara Mastroianni have gone on to follow her into acting but despite the international acclaim Belle de Jour won her, Deneuve was wasted in the US in trifles like 1969’s April Fools and 1975’s Hustle. In the first film she also fell foul of the normally amiable Jack Lemmon, who found her affectedly standoffish, and compared her unfavourably to Garbo. Deneuve, who calls herself a late-developing adolescent, rejects the charge that she is cold: "I am a reserved woman but not a cold woman. People who really know me know that. I am, alas - and I mean alas - a woman with a heart."

Deneuve now says she would love to work with such American directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch, but she understands there is not much call for middle-aged French actresses in their films. She also understands that it is a challenge for European directors to cast her because she brings so much baggage to a role.

However, she does not sit and wait for directors to come calling. Her casting opposite Bjrk in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) was the fruit of a letter that she wrote to the Danish director telling him how much she loved his 1996 film Breaking the Waves, and asking to be considered for a future project. When he cast her as a factory worker, no-one was entirely sure if this was some sort of joke. After all, he later employed Lauren Bacall, another grande dame, and made her sweep floors throughout Dogville.

"I think it’s very tiring to be Catherine Deneuve each day," says Francois Ozon, who directed her in his recent film 8 Women. "I wouldn’t like to be Catherine Deneuve each day because she’s an icon for the French cinema, for the French beauty. Day after day would be heavy to be that."

Other actresses have found that burden of expectation too onerous. Marilyn Monroe made an early exit aged 36. Lana Turner felt unable to confront the world when her youth faded and became a recluse. "Men fall in love with Gilda," said Rita Hayworth ruefully of her most famous role, "but they wake up with Rita Hayworth."

Ava Gardener drank. Brigitte Bardot sought solace in right-wing politics and abandoned donkeys. On the whole, you can’t help feeling Catherine Deneuve has handled the ageing process better than most of these sirens and one daffy published diary is unlikely to chip away her influence. "Catherine Deneuve," according to France’s enduring, endearing and erratic actor Gerard Depardieu, "is the man I’d like to be."