SMOKING BREAK: Do you still get stage fright when you’ve been in front of audiences and cameras as long as Catherine Deneuve has been?
“Yes… I’ve always had it,” revealed the French actress in the first episode of “Smoking Le Podcast,” a series launched Friday as part of the Saint Laurent Rive Droite cultural hub.
Throughout a 33-minute conversation with French journalist Pascale Clark, Deneuve shares insight into some of her roles, but also the fact that she was originally drawn to architecture and painting, not cinema.
A lifelong friend of Yves Saint Laurent — she serenaded him alongside then-model Laetitia Casta for his farewell show — Deneuve revealed that meeting Saint Laurent creative director Anthony Vaccarello at a festival in the late couturier’s honor in Marrakesh, she’d appreciated “what he did, what he said, and his shyness, too.”
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Asked if all of her roles were a kaleidoscope that describes her as a person, the actress felt it was “more of a zigzag.” But true to her reputation as a notoriously private person, she noted that while it was tantalizing to think about, she wasn’t interested in discussing that.
On being in the public eye, she explained that she’d drawn some advantages but “found it difficult to respond positively to an image that you’ve been given without feeling totally invented.”
Deneuve also said that while being called “the most beautiful woman in the world” created pressure and expectations, it also “forced you to look after yourself, when you could let yourself go when you’re not working, not shooting.”
Other topics include her relationship to the press, how she keeps a certain mystery while in the public eye — “it’s more secret than mystery,” she remarks — or what might make her stop acting: “no more scripts that interest me,” was her reply.
Other episodes of the Smoking podcast will have Charlotte Gainsbourg, Laetitia Casta, filmmaker Gaspar Noé and actor Félix Maritaud as guests.
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