Others may vie for the title but Catherine Deneuve remains the undisputed queen of Cannes. Ever since The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Grand Prix at the festival in 1964 and turned her into an international star, it’s been her festival. A few years back, when she tripped on the red-carpeted steps at the Palais, it almost caused a diplomatic incident. “They were too short and too high, so they had to redesign them,” she sniffs, when we meet at a beach-side restaurant looking out on an overcast Riviera.

This year (like last) she arrives at Cannes with two films, including one of the most talked-about of the festival, Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale. And if anyone doubts the allure she stills holds for her nation, billboards all down the Croisette advertise her as the cover star for two glossy French magazines this month. Beat that, Angelina.

The only surprising thing is that Cannes has yet to erect a statue to her. After all, back in 1985, she was chosen by France as the model for its “Marianne” – the Spirit of Revolution. Her face adorned stamps and busts of her head were seen in town halls up and down the country.

Today, wearing cream trousers, a silk blouse with oriental swirls and blue peep-toe stilettos, Deneuve carries it all off with effortless poise.

Even though she’s now 64, it’s not hard to see why François Truffaut once remarked that a filmgoer finds his happiness simply by looking at her. As publicists flutter around her like fawning servants, it’s also clear that she’s used to being treated like royalty, not that she demands it. “Being a queen is always being on a pedestal,” she says, peering at me from behind some particularly stylish shades. “The first thing people want to do when you’re up is to put you down. I would rather stay working; I don’t like that image. I’ve never liked it and I’ve always tried to say it’s really not my thing.”

The latest phase in her hard-working career finds her reunited with Desplechin, with whom she worked on the 2004 film Kings and Queen. “I like his work very much,” she says. A Christmas Tale is an involving, complex story of a dysfunction-al family, in which she plays the matriarch, Junon, who discovers that she has leukaemia and opts for a dangerous bone marrow transplant. Such is the power of her performance that it would be more than fitting if she walked away with the Best Actress prize this weekend for the first time in her career.

The film also gave her the chance to star with her 35-year-old daughter Chiara, from her relationship with the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, whom she met on the 1971 drama It Only Happens to Others. While Deneuve and her daughter have shared several films, including Raoul Ruiz’s 1999 Proust adaptation Time Regained – which also starred Christian, the son she had with director Roger Vadim, whom she met when she was 17 – this was one of the first times they’d had scenes together. “It felt strange and nice for her and for me,” she says. “When we were shooting, we were completely the characters. But it was nice. It was much more casual for me, but the shoot was incredible.”

Acting, of course, is in Deneuve’s blood. Her father was the veteran French actor Maurice Dorléac; her mother, Renée Deneuve, was a child actress who spent her career on the stage. The Parisian-born Deneuve made her screen debut at the age of 13, using her mother’s maiden name. Routine roles were served up, alongside her elder sister Françoise Dor-léac. They even starred together in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort. A year later, in 1967, Françoise was tragically killed in a car crash on the way from St Tropez to Nice airport. Many, including Deneuve, thought that her sister, who had made 20 films, was the one destined for real stardom.

In the end, it was Deneuve who became the star – in Europe at least. She never truly flirted with Hollywood. Aside from Hustle with Burt Reynolds in 1975, her most conscious effort to make it overseas was the vampire thriller The Hunger in 1983, with David Bowie and Susan Sarandon, the third of four lesbian roles she was to play, and a film that won her an enduring gay fan base. Tellingly, when she received the one Oscar nomination of her career, for her role as a plantation owner in Indochine (1992), it was not for an American movie.

More recently, Deneuve has been smart enough to align herself with some of Europe’s maverick directors, including Lars von Trier (Dancer in the Dark) and François Ozon (8 Women). “I think I was quite lucky to be offered different parts at a certain time of my life,” she says. “I suppose around my forties it was a little more difficult and I was not so pleased with the films that I was offered and the way it was going. But then I was lucky enough to do [François Truffaut’s 1980 film] The Last Metro, and that really changed things. But it’s true that I’m always trying to find things that are a little more on the side. It’s my nature. At least I have to think it’s different.”

You can certainly say that about her other film at the festival, Je Veux Voir (I Want To See). In an absorbing mix of fiction and fact, Deneuve plays herself – or at least a version of herself – as she travels to Lebanon to see the devastation of the war that broke out in the country in July 2006. Much of the film consists of her travelling with a local actor (Rabih Mroue) by car to the area. Such is the naturalistic style that it’s as if Deneuve is starring in an Abbas Kiarostami film. “I felt that I had to play myself but not as Catherine Deneuve,” she says. “I had the impression I was in between myself as a person and myself as an actress.”

Deneuve is quietly political – in the past she has also protested in favour of abortion and against the death penalty – and it’s not the first time that she has got involved in a film about the Middle East. Last year in Cannes she was one of the voices in Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical animated film Persepolis.

“People always ask you about your political views in interviews now – generally I refuse to answer,” she says. “So with this, I thought it was better to say something about what I feel about Lebanese people than just to talk very lightly in interviews.”

Yet you get the impression that she’s far removed from the ice-cool image fostered by films such as Belle de Jour and Repulsion. She may be cultivated, aloof, charming and liberated, with the aura of a fashion diva from her long-held association with Yves Saint Laurent, yet Deneuve is surprisingly good at dismantling the myth that surrounds her. You want to know her favourite evening tipple? “I drink burgundy or vodka. I will drink vodka more than scotch. I don’t like scotch.” And her favourite hobby? “I do a lot of gardening. You cannot think of something else when you’re gardening. It’s very absorbing.”

Tending her roses seems a far cry from being the centre of attention in Cannes, and Deneuve admits that she finds the whole hoopla tiring.

“It’s always mixed, the memories of Cannes,” she sighs. “You go so high, so much expectation in a few days, then the night the film is finished, it’s gone and they go to another film. It’s so quick and so fast. You get a little depressed after Cannes. Too much tension . . . but for actors it’s even quicker. You come for a few days, you are at the top, and then the film is gone.”

If one thing hasn’t worked out for Deneuve, it’s men. After Vadim and before Mastroianni, she spent seven years married to the photographer David Bailey before they divorced in 1972. It was he who made the infamous comment: “Managing Catherine was like trying to manage a Maserati when you’re used to a Ford.”

She never remarried after Bailey, and the men became less glamorous – though she dated the TV businessman Pierre Lescure for a time – and now she’s single. Does she understand what love means? “I’m not so sure now,” she muses. And for the first time today she seems a little uncertain.

A Christmas Tale and Je Veux Voir will be released later this year

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