Catherine Deneuve celebrates her 80th birthday! The opportunity to return to her missed meeting with Alfred Hitchcock, who almost directed the French actress in a spy film in the early 70s!
The great Catherine Deneuve celebrates her 80th birthday! While she is at the top of the news with her incarnation of Bernadette Chirac in Bernadette and her role as a Marvel superhero, we invite you to look back on her Hollywood career and in particular this spy film that she almost missed. filmed under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock in the early 70s!
The Hollywood industry, Catherine Deneuve discovered it in 1968, at the age of 25, while playing in Mayerling, a historical drama which returns to the tragic love story of Archduke Rudolf of Austria (played by Omar Sharif ) and his mistress Marie Vetsera (Catherine Deneuve). Then the actress starred in the comedy April Follies alongside Jack Lemmon.
These two Hollywood attempts ended in failure and Deneuve was no longer attracted by the lights of American cinema, to the point that she refused a role as a James Bond Girl in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. But when a certain Alfred Hitchcock courted to star in a spy film, the French actress can’t say no.
The spy film in question that the master of suspense is working on is called The Short Night. It tells the story, inspired by true events, of an English double agent sentenced to a long prison sentence for relations with the USSR. He will manage to escape in the company of another Irish inmate.
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In 1970, Hitchcock, who had acquired the rights to two books on the subject, wanted to give the main roles of The Short Night to Catherine Deneuve and Walter Matthau. But the project was postponed numerous times. Regardless of whether stars like Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery and Liv Ullmann are then approached, the pieces of the puzzle of The Short Night, with its almost complete storyline, never manage to come together and the project will ultimately never see the light of day. the day.
In an interview given in 2010 to our colleagues at L’ExpressCatherine Deneuve spoke of this missed meeting with the master of suspense. “It’s one of my regrets, like never having worked with Mankiewicz“she declared. “I could imagine myself in Hitchcock’s world. We had lunch together, he had me read a script. Things were well underway, but he left too quickly, unfortunately.”
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