The Venice Film Festival has kicked off and on the first night French screen diva Catherine Deneuve has received the Golden Lion Award for career achievement. Arriving at the Lido for the 79th edition of the world’s oldest film fest, the 79-year-old actress told reporters she had “never been sexy or an icon” and had no advice for aspiring actresses. And although Deneuve was wearing a pin with the Ukrainian flag, she was not willing to say anything about it. “I don’t want to say anything because my words could be misunderstood”.
Naming her this year’s honoree, Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera enumerated the long list of outstanding artists that Deneuve has worked with–and inspired–from directors Roger Vadim, Jacques Demy, Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut and Roman Polanski to such actors as Marcello Mastroianni and Gérard Depardieu. She is also one of the rare performers to have received an Oscar nomination for a non-English performance, picking up a best actress nomination in 1993 for Régis Wargnier’s Indochine.
“It is always very difficult when you have to stop and look back at things as if you made decisions as if you were thinking of the future, but it is never like that,” Deneuve said. “There is a lot of luck, good decisions, sometimes wrong ones. After so many years, you have a list to look at, and you hope that you picked right most of the time.”
When asked to name her most significant works, Deneuve picked out Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), and her work with Truffaut and André Téchiné as the most important in her career.
The 78-year-old actress has no plans to retire from the cinema and has two new projects in the works, Léa Domenach’s La tortue, currently shooting, and the English-language feature Funny Birds, from directors Marco La Via and Hanna Ladoul, set to go into production later this year.
When asked about the opportunities still afforded to an actress her age, Deneuve said she felt it was “much better to be in Europe than in America if you are an actress and are older… things have changed a lot [around ageism in the film business], but I still think things are better in Europe for that.”
Deneuve is no Venice newbie. Her breakthrough film, Belle de jour from director Buñuel, won Venice’s Golden Lion in 1967, and Deneuve took home the Coppa Volpi for best actress at the festival in 1998 for her performance in Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme.
