Catherine Deneuve: ‘I was a symbol, I suppose’

It is with some apprehension that I greet the big-haired blonde who walks into the light-flooded Left Bank Paris apartment of François de Ricqlès, chairman of Christie’s France, for pre-lunch drinks. France may have sent its last king packing in 1848, but that has not stopped it needing a queen: someone who unites the nation and embodies its cherished national characteristics.

The woman with a rock-solid claim to that notional throne is now sitting next to me, asking if I have a light for the first of many cigarettes she will smoke this afternoon. Now in her seventies, and still blessed with that immaculate blonde coiffure, Catherine Deneuve radiates authority. But the glacial composure, of which so much is often made, has been replaced by a quality that can only be called . . . friendliness. She appears to have given aloof, unattainable Catherine the weekend off, leaving in her place a relaxed woman dropping in to see a friend for Sunday lunch.

Relaxed, yes, but chic: dressing down Deneuve-style involves a black Prada knit strewn with large orchids, along with black trousers and patent boots with big brass eyelets, described with a flick of the wrist and the words “that’s Vuitton”. In a voice dusted with a delightful huskiness, she switches back and forth between French and English; absent-mindedly lights the filtered end of a cigarette and then quickly discards it with a giggle. There is no other way of putting it: she is simply good company.

We are meeting to review catalogue proofs for the sale of Deneuve’s collection of Yves Saint Laurent couture, which takes place later this month. The lots on offer illustrate the various stages of a very public life, and tell the story of a long friendship. There are gowns galore, many of which have seen service in Cannes and Venice as well as at the Oscars, Césars and Golden Globes. There are also a couple of particularly eye-popping Paris Match cover looks: an arresting pink satin suit and a dress featuring a large metallic bird perched on the shoulder.

The collection crept up on her. For many years Deneuve’s couture pieces were consigned to the cavernous attic of her country house. But then the time came to downsize. “I didn’t realise there were so many clothes,” she says. “When Christie’s asked how many pieces, I said: ‘Maybe 100, 150 at the most.’ In fact it is almost 300. So it became something important, a statement, which I didn’t think of at the beginning.”

Deneuve acquired her first piece of couture in 1965. She was in London filming Repulsion with Roman Polanski. The director introduced her to David Bailey, the photographer who would become her husband of seven years. “He was really very handsome and charming — as only an Englishman can be,” she says. “Very eccentric. He lived in a house where there was a huge room downstairs full of birds — it was like living in a nursery with children screaming.”

In need of a dress in which to be presented to the Queen, she asked Bailey, then at the apotheosis of his career, for help. “He advised me to go to Saint Laurent. There was a dress I wanted from the season before. So I came along with a newspaper clipping.”

The image of shy young Deneuve coming to see shy young Saint Laurent clutching a press cutting has a charming naïveté about it. Alas, the Russian-inspired dress was not archived, but from that first meeting flourished a decades-long friendship and collaboration.

It was Saint Laurent, of course, who designed Deneuve’s wardrobe for the 1967 film Belle de Jour. Deneuve was 23 when she played the prim housewife turned prostitute in Luis Buñuel’s subversive study of sex and haute bourgeoisie: a role that involved having her clothes ripped from her body, being gagged, flogged, tied up and pelted with mud — and maintaining an imperturbable beauty throughout.

Belle de Jour established Deneuve as the prototypical Frenchwoman of the heady postwar trente glorieuses: smart and sexually complex. But don’t let the sex distract you from the style; Belle de Jour is a sublimely chic film. Everybody has dressed up — even her dodgy Nureyev-lookalike gangster lover swaggers about in a leather greatcoat with a cane. But it is Deneuve and her clothes that remain in the mind. “Belle de Jour owes a lot to Yves Saint Laurent,” she says modestly.

In Saint Laurent’s lifetime, Deneuve was as much a part of the designer’s circus as Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise — she even sang at the culmination of Saint Laurent’s farewell show in 2002. But she rejects the label “muse”. “No, no, we worked together, and we had a very good relationship. But I don’t think it is right to call me a muse. His muses were Betty and Loulou.”

Instead they shared a certain sympathy. “You are more aware of what you wear,” she says of the experience of wearing his clothes. “You feel totally different. When you live in public, it gives you an attitude that helps you be confident with people you don’t know.” In Saint Laurent she found the perfect wardrobe master for her life-long role as Catherine Deneuve.

Deneuve does not allow life as a screen goddess to restrict her enjoyment of more earthly pleasures: a slim cigarette is attached to her right hand like a sixth finger, and she does justice to a superb lunch that culminates with a soufflé so excellent that she breaks into a five-minute encomium to the cook. Whether speaking in favour of abortion in the early 1970s or wading into #MeToo more recently (last January, she put her name to an open letter criticising Hollywood’s new puritanism) or simply having a second helping of soufflé, Deneuve does as she pleases.

I ask her when she transitioned from mere celebrity to becoming a landmark in the cultural geography of France. She answers: “Before I was Marianne.” She refers to the 1985 poll in which she was chosen as the model for the female personification of liberty, enshrined in France’s national identity by Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People”.

“I was quite surprised they chose someone like me because I had a child out of marriage,” she says of the honour, which has been bestowed also on Laetitia Casta and Brigitte Bardot. Actually, to be accurate, she had two children out of wedlock — one with Roger Vadim, director of Barbarella, another with actor Marcello Mastroianni. “My private life was maybe not in the direction of what everybody thinks is right. But probably a lot of women voted and it was a sign of liking a woman with more independence, not being married, having children, working. I was a symbol, I suppose,” she shrugs.

With one or two exceptions, such as the straw hat she wore in François Truffaut’s 1969 film Mississippi Mermaid, the Christie’s sale is made up not of screen costumes but of Deneuve’s personal wardrobe. As she leafs through the catalogue, memories are stirred. A beaded evening dress from 1969 recalls a party with Truffaut where she was introduced to Alfred Hitchcock: a memory accompanied by a pang of regret at never having worked with the master of suspense. A mauve and green chiffon gown is a memento of a night at a gala in 1974 with Mastroianni. “He was very elegant in himself but he was not really very fancy,” she says. “Il avait beaucoup d’allure but he was not elegant like [actor] Philippe Noiret, for example.”

A rust-coloured wool suit recalls a reception at the Elysée Palace for fashion designers, while a patchwork print was worn to the White House more than 25 years ago. All the while, the accompanying images attest to her otherworldly beauty, and her effortless ability to upstage everyone, from Brooke Shields in the 1980s to Bjork in the 2000s.

Of course it wouldn’t be a proper collection of Yves Saint Laurent without a tuxedo or two. The sale features variations on “Le Smoking”: a classic black worn alongside a skinny Gérard Depardieu for the New York premiere of The Last Metro; and a white version worn with a fuller-figured Depardieu at the Frankfurt Opera Ball in 1998. There is also the wide-legged Smoking she wore to the 20th-anniversary party for the designer’s couture house in 1982: unless she was filming, she made a point of attending all of his shows.

The catalogue is light on the 1970s. The death of Deneuve’s sister Françoise, also an actress, in a car accident in the late 1960s threw a long shadow over the decade that followed. It also coincided with a time when she was working in America, which kept her away from the front row. It did mean, however, that she had the chance to work with Burt Reynolds.

“He was a charming man. He had a great sense of humour,” she recalls. “I remember going to his trailer and everything was monogrammed. He said: ‘If I could have, I would have put it on my toilet paper.’ ”

With a life so rich in anecdote and incident, it is a shame that Deneuve has stubbornly refused to write her memoirs. This sale at least allows us to read her wardrobe as a biography in clothes.

‘Catherine Deneuve, Yves Saint Laurent: de mode et d’amitié’ takes place on January 24 at Christie’s Paris; christies.com

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