Catherine Deneuve and The Terrified Naked Model

Yesterday was the 67th birthday of the one and only Catherine Deneuve. As some of you know, she's one of my top ten actresses of all time. I didn't celebrate because I was too busy tinkering with blog coding. (Lots of good changes coming. Cross your fingers)

<-- Deneuve with foxy François on the Potiche promotional trail.

Here in the USA when people talk about 60something actresses, it's almost always the big M's: Mirren, Meryl. I'd argue that neither of those admittedly great talents, is still as adventurous in their movie choices as the big D "Deneuve". Deneuve is still consistently serving it up for auteurs in her late 60s. She was wondrous as the unsentimental cancer-striken matriarch in Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale a couple of years ago and in her current film, Potiche, now playing in France, she's bringing her style and comic sophistication to the latest from François Ozon. It's the second joint effort for the legendary star and the prolific gay director after the musical 8 Women (2002).

She just did an interview for the French gay magazine TÊTU. There's more on that after the jump. But be warned that it's NSFW unless your coworkers go around mooning each other. (And if so, no judgements!)

Deneuve wasn't always this keen on the gay mags. The best selling lesbian magazine Curve was launched as "Deneuve" in the early 90s but she wasn't happy about it and they had to change their name. But I suppose whatever your comfort level with anything, your name is your name is your name. Maybe if there was going to be a Deneuve magazine, she wanted it be more like Oprah's "O" (short for Onanistic). In the bottom right hand corner of the Têtu cover -- you'll have to take your eyes off Deneuve and the memorable acc assessory -- you'll see that the magazine also promises a piece on why the films of Jacques Demy resonate with the gays.

Sadly, an American gay magazine cover would never promise such a treat. American gays used to be culturally sophisticated but now we're just like everyone else and only watch reality tv.

The interview with Deneuve isn't online but if you can read French, the magazine did post an amusing interview with the cover boy Johan Akan on what's it's like to be buck naked in front of a total legend.

What's that, reader? Oh shut up you do not know; dreams don't count!

(I can't really read French either but I suspect that Deneuve had to have been even more intimidating for Johan than that robot chick who shaved him.)