French film icon suffers stroke

The French actress Catherine Deneuve, pictured, is in a Paris hospital after suffering a small stroke, her family said.

The 76-year-old screen icon who made her name in such classic films as Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, had a “very limited stroke which is reversible”, her family said in a statement.

“Happily, she has no loss of motor function, although she will, of course, have to rest for a while,” said the statement, issued on behalf of her family by her agent, Claire Blondel.

Deneuve is arguably the most famous French actress of all time, having starred in more than 100 films, most recently alongside Juliette Binoche in Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth.

The actress was shooting her latest film, De son vivant, when she was taken ill.

A source had earlier told the French television news channel BFMTV that Deneuve was suffering from “exhaustion after doing too much”.

As the news of her stroke broke, fans took to social media to post getwell-soon messages and photographs of the star in her prime.

Known in her youth as the “Ice Queen” for her cool, perfect blonde looks, the director Francois Truffaut said Deneuve was so beautiful “that a cinemagoer finds his happiness simply by looking at her”.

Rising to stardom in the 1960s, cinema greats from Bunuel to Truffaut, Demy and Polanski queued up to work with her.

She caused a scandal in 1966 by playing a bored housewife who becomes a prostitute in her spare time in Belle de Jour.

Five years later, she made global headlines again by signing a petition with 342 other French women artists and intellectuals who admitted they had undergone illegal abortions.