French cinema legend Catherine Deneuve beamed Wednesday as she slipped into the press conference room at the Venice International Film Festival.
Deneuve will be honored this year in Venice with the Festival’s Golden Lion for his life’s work.
Venice Artistic Director Alberto Barbera named her this year’s laureate, rattling off the long list of acclaimed creatives with whom Deneuve has collaborated and inspired, ranging from directors Roger Vadim, Jacques Demy, Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut and Roman Polanski to actors like Marcello Mastroianni and Gerhard Depardieu. She is also one of the rare actresses to have received an Oscar nomination for a non-English performance, receiving a Best Actress nomination for Régis Wargnier’s Indochine in 1993.
“It’s always very difficult to stop and look back at things like you’ve made decisions, like you’re thinking about the future, but it never is,” 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 hope you made the right choice most of the time.”
Deneuve singled out Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and her work with Truffaut and André Téchiné as the most important of her career.
Not that the 78-year-old actress has any plans to stop working. She has two new projects on the horizon, Léa Domenach’s La tortue, which is currently filming, and the English-language feature film Funny Birds, directed by Marco La Via and Hanna Ladoul, which is due for production later this year.
Considering her age, Deneuve said she felt it was “a lot better to be in Europe than in America, being an actress and being older… things have changed a lot.” [around ageism in the film business]but I still think Europe is better for that.”
Deneuve is a Venice regular. Her breakthrough film Belle de jour, directed by Buñuel, won the 1967 Venice Golden Lion, and Deneuve took home the 1998 Coppa Volpi for Best Actress at the festival for her performance in Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme.
Deneuve will receive her lifetime honor at Wednesday’s opening gala.