Catherine Deneuve

Catherine Deneuve plays the smart wife of the murdered man in François Ozon's 8 Women. Ginette Vincendeau's archive piece relays something Deneuve said to Libération: she is not sure Ozon loves women, but she thinks he loves actresses. The same piece gives a career fact, that she and Danielle Darrieux had played mother and daughter in three films before this one. Keith Reader's piece on Le Temps retrouvé finds her both queenly and dishevelled as Odette. Peter Matthews objects to the use made of her in Dancer in the Dark, writing that the film summons her to recall The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and then seems surprised to have so little for her to do. Another piece of Reader's counts her work in a film our catalogue has no record of among the best of her middle age, and ties that to a gain he also sees in Ma saison préférée. An honorary Golden Bear came to her from the Berlinale in 1998. The lead actress César came to her twice: in 1981 for The Last Metro and in 1993 for Indochine.