Deneuve to get Montreal World Film Fest honour

The Montreal World Film Festival  will pay tribute to Catherine Deneuve in August, honouring the French film icon with its Grand Prize of the Americas.

Deneuve, 67, has worked with auteur directors such as Jacques Demy and Luis Buñuel as well as Hollywood talent such as Robert Aldrich and Stuart Rosenberg. She is expected to attend the Montreal festival.

"Catherine Deneuve occupies a special place in the pantheon of great screen actors. She has collaborated with the greatest filmmakers of modern cinema and she has conquered the world with her immense talent," festival president Serge Losique said in a press statement Thursday.

The festival, scheduled for Aug. 18-28, has yet to announce its lineup.

Raised in a show-business family, Deneuve decided on a career in film at age 16 and starred in Roger Vadim's Vice and Virtue in 1963.

She sprang to wide attention in Demy's Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a Palme d'or winner at Cannes. She established herself as a magnetic and beautiful actress with three early roles — as a schizophrenic killer in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), as a married woman who works as a part-time prostitute every afternoon in Buñuel's Belle de jour (1967), and as a frigid femme fatale in François Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid (1969). 

Deneuve won France's César award for best actress for her roles in 1980's The Last Metro and 1992's Indochine. She also was nominated for an Academy Award for Indochine in which she plays a French woman who adopts a Vietnamese girl in Indochina.

She is currently appearing in Les bien-aimés and is filming Astérix and Obélix: God Save Britannia, where she plays Queen Cordelia of England.