She is a cinema legend, a matriarch of the seventh art. Catherine Deneuve, whose documentary Deneuve, Queen Catherine retraces her career this Thursday, April 14 on France 3, is also the mother of several children, one of whom she had very early, very young … even if it means putting a few people back to back among his relatives. In 1961, the actress met the director Roger Vadim, 16 years older than her, on the set of the film The Parisians. Crazy in love, she quickly felt the need to concretize this relationship by moving up a gear.
“Very young, I wanted to have a child and I had the intuition that it would be difficultshe said in 2021 in the columns of the magazine She. I was very much in love with the father of my son ChristianIt was in 1963 that Catherine Deneuve gave birth to her first child, when she was 20 years old. The problem is that despite the fact that she had been in a relationship with Roger Vadim for three years , the actress had not wished to formalize things in front of the mayor.It was not done at all, at the time, to expect a baby without being married, and moreover I was a minorshe recalls. But I wanted a baby! It was complicated, passionate, violent, a drama in my family.“
An inexplicable marriage
The only man she agreed to marry in her life was photographer David Bailey. Catherine Deneuve joined the artist in England in 1965, with Mick Jagger and his sister Françoise Dorléac as witnesses. But the divorce was filed two years later and the actress seems to no longer understand why she agreed to say “yes“.”I can’t explain what came over me when I married photographer David Baileyshe explained, Illustrated Evening, 10 years later. I did not take long, it is true, to ask for a divorce. But this marriage, why? It was not a ‘gag’, as I have heard it said: I had consented to it and, therefore, thought it through well, first of all. It was, perhaps, only a momentum, an impulse or something else that I don’t know…“
Catherine Deneuve subsequently welcomed her daughter Chiara, when she was in love with Marcello Mastroianni. As for the birth of his eldest, it has in no way slowed down his career as many feared. It was with Christian in her arms that she learned the many songs of the film The Umbrellas of Cherboug by Jacques Demy. However, it is, still in 2022, one of her most popular roles, undoubtedly the one that propelled her to where she is today…