Lovely? Sure, but what a legacy

For MUCH of her life, Catherine Deneuve, who turns 65 this year, has been a leading lady of European art cinema, not to mention an avatar of European beauty and glamour. In her native France, she is literally an iconic figure, having served as the face of Chanel, of Yves Saint Laurent, and even at one point of Marianne, the idealized emblem of the French Republic.

At last month's Cannes Film Festival, she missed out on the best actress trophy but received a special jury award, the 61st Festival Prize, that amounted to a career achievement award (the other recipient was Clint Eastwood).

Deneuve's resume spans nearly 50 years and 100 movies. She started in the early days of the French New Wave and worked with some of the movement's key directors, including Jacques Demy ("The Umbrellas of Cherbourg") and Francois Truffaut ("Mississippi Mermaid"). She has spanned multiple generations of major European filmmakers, from Luis Bunuel ("Belle de Jour") and Roman Polanski ("Repulsion") to some of today's more interesting auteurs, among them Lars von Trier ("Dancer in the Dark") and Arnaud Desplechin (this year’s superb Cannes entry “A Christmas Tale”).

A filmography this long and prolific is bound to have its fallow patches. Lionsgate's Catherine Deneuve collection, out Tuesday, is far from a greatest hits compilation -- the five films here, which range from feeble to quite good, have largely been forgotten -- but it does attest to her beguiling consistency. Even in the most pedestrian movies, you could count on her to be a movie star.

From the beginning, people have tended to remark on Deneuve's looks more than her talents, but in her case, the two often seem closely linked. David Thomson in his "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" calls her beauty "a receptacle for any imagination," which might sound like a back-handed compliment, but Deneuve, unlike many screen sirens, is always subtly in control of her appearance, coolly aware of her sexual allure.

(The Deneuve set is part of Lionsgate's ongoing series devoted to European sex symbols, after earlier Brigitte Bardot and Alain Delon collections; a four-film Sophia Loren set is also being released this week.)

The chosen films represent a variety of genres -- thriller, comedy, drama -- but all center ultimately on romance, which is to be expected since Deneuve was pegged early in her career as a certain kind of feminine ideal, both icy and sensuous.