Catherine Deneuve reveals in a photo book her deep admiration for Marilyn Monroe, who was a “very good actress” beyond the glamorous myth surrounding the American star born 100 years ago. In Marilyn chérie (Flammarion), to be published on Wednesday, the French actress explains at length why she cherishes Marilyn, “the most beautiful image ever seen on a screen”.
“As soon as she appears on screen, there is something that seems to jump out of the screen. It’s a whole: the quality of the skin, the look, his voice […] a sweetness, a certain lightness,” she says in this book, where she comments on a hundred photos of the actress selected by the collector Sébastien Cauchon. Catherine Deneuve never met Marilyn Monroe, born June 1, 1926, but she “saw all her films”, including Men prefer blondes, Seven years of reflection ou Some like it hothis favorite. “I could never have experienced what she experienced. I was not pursued like she was by the paparazzi, testifies Catherine Deneuve.
Marilyn, who died on August 4, 1962 at age 36, “was very conscious of her image and the use that could be made of it […] She was very modern in truth,” according to her. “Marilyn Monroe is a burden that I carry around everywhere,” the actress confessed to the American journalist WJ Weatherby, who recounts in Conversations with Marilyn (Éditions Seghers) their long discussions in “a drunk bar” on 8th Avenue in New York in the 1960s.
The most famous photos of the actress are collected in Marilyn Monroe 100 (Hugo), in which the main photographers who immortalized the Hollywood icon are present. The centenary of her birth is also being celebrated with a retrospective at the Cinémathèque française until July 26 in Paris, which brings to light another facet of the Marilyn myth shaped by Hollywood studios.
