THANK YOU FOR SMOKING Deneuve lights up the screen.

Full disclosure: I still cannot believe my good fortune to have been granted a 30-minute in-person interview with the most famous Frenchwoman in the world, the actor who inspired my undying Francophilia, if not my choice of profession. I had been in the presence of Catherine Deneuve a few times before, witnessing her formidable prowess during press conferences and luncheons at the Cannes and New York Film Festivals, but never had the pleasure of conducting a one-on-one chat with the woman who starred in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Repulsion, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Belle de Jour and The Hunger.

In New York last month to promote A Christmas Tale—her second film with director Arnaud Desplechin, after 2004’s Kings and Queen—Deneuve, sporting a handsome chocolate-brown ensemble and brunet hair, held court at the Bowery Hotel. The actor, 65, chain-smoking what might have been the world’s skinniest cigarettes during an engaged, lively conversation, had a regal yet approachable mien—somewhat similar to that of Junon, the indomitable matriarch who finds out she has cancer in A Christmas Tale. “Arnaud wanted Junon to be very alive, to rarely mention that she’s really ill,” Deneuve says. “What’s more difficult is playing a mother who’s also a person. In real life, it’s different: You can just be a mother for your children for the time you are with them. But onscreen you have to be a real person.”

One of the more fascinating scenes in A Christmas Tale features Deneuve telling her wayward son, Henri (Mathieu Amalric), that she doesn’t love him; she coolly declared at a press conference at Cannes, where A Christmas Tale had its world premiere, “Maternal love is not innate.” She still believes that’s true, even though the sentiment doesn’t apply to her own child Chiara Mastroianni, who also stars in A Christmas Tale as Junon’s daughter-in-law, Sylvia—whom, incidentally, Junon is not especially fond of. “That was so funny to me,” Deneuve says. “Junon’s relationship with Sylvia is so far away from my relationship with my children.” She then adds with a laugh: “I’m deeply in love with my daughter.”

When conversation turns to memorable celluloid mothers, Deneuve, an avid cinephile (she spoke glowingly about Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light), singles out Nora Swinburne in Jean Renoir’s The River (1951). Then (speaking of mothers who are deeply in love with their daughters) she mentions her dream project: “I would love to do a remake of Mildred Pierce,” the Joan Crawford noir/maternal melodrama from 1945 that Deneuve has seen three times. “I wanted to do it for television as a three-hour movie,” she explains. “Soon it’s going to be too late for me [to play the part], but the difficulty is in getting the rights. Let’s talk about it—maybe they will change their minds!”

Whether or not the rights holders of Mildred Pierce ever come to their senses, Deneuve, in a career that’s spanned nearly 50 years, remains constantly busy. At Cannes she straightforwardly explained the key to a flourishing, long career: “You either have curiosity or you don’t.” She happily expounds on that belief. “The problem for actors is that, when they become famous, they can very quickly get put in a sort of—it’s not really a box; it’s a little more complicated. Even if the script is good, you don’t want to have the impression that it’s just following something that you’ve already done. I remember after doing The Last Metro [1980], which was very successful, I was offered a lot of roles in that same kind of character. But then I went to an audition for Hotel of the Americas [1981], and it was a very different character. It’s very important to work with people who have known you for a long time because they don’t see you as a sort of icon.”

What qualities, then, must a film have to pique Deneuve’s curiosity? “I have to get the impression that the director is really the author of the film,” she says. When she talks about her admiration for Desplechin, a true auteur, she speaks as both an actor and a film lover. “He’s incredibly alive and participates in everything. After I saw his film La Sentinelle, I didn’t immediately think, Am I going to work with him? It was just the pleasure of seeing the film.”

A Christmas Tale opens Fri 14.

Video: Catherine the great »
The quintessential French actor has made more than 100 films. Though we wish we could have shown clips from all of them, we settled on ten of Deneuve’s most spectacular moments in anticipation of the release of A Christmas Tale. Think of it as our early holiday gift to you.