Catherine Deneuve, of course, brings her dog.

Jack — “not Jacques, Jack!” — a pointy-eared Shiba Inu, stands at attention throughout the interview, his eyes fixed on her like a discreet, furry security guard.

“I usually have him on set with me,” she says, patting his head. “He is always very good.”

We’re tucked into a cozy corner of a boutique Left Bank hotel. Deneuve’s tasteful Louis Vuitton handbag is tossed on the chaise lounge. As we chat, she punctuates her answers with the occasional puff from her vape — “I did quit smoking for a while, even did hypnosis, but I started again,” she says, waving the vape. “This, however, is not smoking. It’s nothing.”

It’s a classy, casual, almost domestic setting for what at times feels akin to a papal audience. This is Catherine Deneuve! Not just the face of French film but quite literally the face of France. In 1989, for the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Deneuve’s face was used as the image of Marianne, the French national emblem of liberty and reason. She is, de facto, an icon.

Deneuve’s onscreen persona is simultaneously that of sweet Geneviève, romantic idealism personified, in Jacques Demy’s magical 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; and Carole Ledoux, the Belgian girl in London whose sexual repression turns homicidal in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). She’s Séverine, haute-bourgeois housewife who moonlights as an S&M submissive in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967); and the camp star who sends up her own iconography in both Tony Scott’s lesbian vampire thriller The Hunger (1983) and François Ozon’s murder mystery musical 8 Women (2002).

At once liberated and conservative, radical and restrained (and, some would say, occasionally reactionary), Deneuve, more than any actress, more than any filmmaker, embodies French cinema in all its glorious, confounding contradiction. Deneuve is not just a legend of the Croisette. She’s the legend.

Deneuve returns to Cannes not as a retrospective figure but as a working actor. She has two films in official competition: Alongside Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel and others in the ensemble drama Parallel Tales, from two-time Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, A Salesman); and as the mother of Léa Seydoux in Gentle Monster, from Austrian director Marie Kreutzer (Corsage). “Oh, they are very small roles,” she says modestly. “But even a small role must be necessary. When a role is small, I always ask myself: ‘If this character were removed from the script, would it matter?’ If not, then it isn’t very interesting. I’m also of course interested in the director, especially if they are young and the way they speak about the film has energy, something open and new. Then I want to be part of it.”

But Cannes is more than a current stop on the circuit for Deneuve — it is the throughline of her career, the stage on which her legend was first forged.

Deneuve’s Cannes story began with a coronation. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, her first lead role, won the Palme d’Or and transformed the 20-year-old ingenue into an international star.

“We knew [the film] was special when were shooting it, the story was very different, and the film was entirely sung. Everything had to be recorded before shooting, so we had to learn the whole film in advance. It was a very special experience,” she recalls. “But it was the beginning of my career, and everything was new. Even winning [the Palme d’Or] felt unreal because I didn’t fully understand it yet. The moment I especially remember from Cannes is when [Lars von Trier’s] Dancer in the Dark won the Palme d’Or [in 2000]. That recognition, that stayed with me.”

Between Umbrellas and Dancer — two musicals at opposite poles of the joy-to-anguish spectrum — Deneuve has been back to Cannes so many times, she can barely keep count. Her 1994 festival, where she served on the jury alongside Clint Eastwood, stands out. The jury’s Palme d’Or pick was Pulp Fiction. Deneuve handed the trophy to Quentin Tarantino, anointing a new generation of indie cinema — a choice that would prove as divisive as it was defining.

“Oh, the reaction in the theater! People were shouting, they were so angry. It was such a new kind of film that some didn’t understand it,” she remembers. “But inside the jury, there was not much conflict. Clint Eastwood, though, didn’t talk much. He knew what he decided, but he didn’t explain it much to the others.”

Scandal, for Deneuve, is nothing new. Over the course of six-plus decades onscreen playing serial killers, kinky housewives and lesbian vampires, she’s rarely seen a cinema piety she wouldn’t transgress. The fresh-faced Geneviève of Umbrellas would be shocked.

It was just a year after Umbrellas that Deneuve transformed for Polanski’s dark, violent and over-the-top Repulsion. Her performance shifted from romantic transparency, from the open joy of Geneviève, to Carole Ledoux’s unreadable froideur.

Repulsion and, more significantly, her performance two years later in Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, would cement Deneuve’s image as the “ice queen” of French cinema, as an indecipherable projection of male desire, poised between repression and release. For a modern audience, the premise of the film, and its depiction of female sexuality, seems almost inconceivable.

Deneuve admits some Belle de Jour scenes “were difficult. I wasn’t ready to do everything exactly as written,” she says. “And Luis Buñuel didn’t explain much to actors, so at the beginning, it was complicated. But the film went well, and after that we did another film together [Tristana], which was wonderful.”

Repulsion and Belle de Jour turned her into a bona fide sex symbol. (Her two Playboy pictorials, in 1963 and 1965, the latter shot by future husband David Bailey, also helped.) But such is the apparent contradiction that is Catherine Deneuve that the actress who helped define the language of sexual liberation rarely bared it all onscreen.

“I’m not a big fan of nudity in films,” she muses. “When you are naked, you are no longer quite a character — you are just a person, a body. It’s difficult to stay in the story of a character.”

There’s a similar tension in Deneuve’s public image and her cultural politics, which can appear, depending on where you’re standing, to be simultaneously progressive and reactionary.

Offscreen, Deneuve has been a mostly dependable progressive: a signatory of the 1971 “Manifesto of the 343” protesting France’s abortion laws; a petitioner against the death penalty; and, at Cannes last year, a voice condemning the killing of Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna. But the petition most people remember is her 2018 open letter in Le Monde, chastising #MeToo as a witch hunt. She later apologized to victims and distanced herself from those who had “found it strategic to support me.” For many, however, the letter — combined with her refusal to distance herself from Polanski and longtime friend Gérard Depardieu — convicted in 2025 of sexually assaulting two women on a film set — places her firmly in the reactionary camp.

Asked who was her best screen partner — from an incomparable list that includes Marcello Mastroianni, Jack Lemmon, Burt Reynolds, Daniel Auteuil and Michel Piccoli — she barely hesitates. “Gérard Depardieu. Because he is completely present. With some actors, you feel they are not fully listening. With him, everything is alive in the moment.”

On #MeToo’s lasting impact, she is circumspect. “It’s very complicated. Sometimes accusations come many years later, which raises questions. People must be very careful. It has made everyone more aware, more cautious. I’m very careful [what I say].”

But the queen of French cinema is not one for regrets. She would have liked to work with Alfred Hitchcock — “We had a project. It was a sort of spy movie. It was a fine script, so I met him, but then nothing happened” — and to have made a few more American movies. “I had a very good experience working with Jack Lemmon [on her first Hollywood movie, 1969’s The April Fools]. Then I did the film with Burt Reynolds [1975’s Hustle], which I liked very much. He was a wonderful actor and such a nice man.” And, as Deneuve put it in an earlier interview, “very funny … for an American.”

She does still long for celluloid and the era of screening the dailies. “I used to like watching dailies — discussing scenes afterward. You see some things that you wouldn’t notice when you are shooting,” she notes, wistfully. “[Now] directors watch monitors instead of being directly involved in the scene. That has disappeared. Everything is faster now, less collective.”

What hasn’t changed for the 82-year-old actress is the essential appeal of the work: “I still love going to the cinema — being in a theater with people, feeling that shared atmosphere. And I still love making films. I try to choose only what I truly want to do. It’s not just work — it’s something I love.”

Outside, Paris moves at its usual pace. Deneuve gathers her things. Jack rises with her, attentive as ever.

“It’s a great luck to have a life like this.”

This story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.