The mother of one, she had a son in 1963 with French screenwriter Roger Vadim, was given the opportunity to star with her big sister, older by one year, in the 1967 musical The Young Girls of Rochefort. Closely bonded, the two sisters looked alike so playing twins in the film wasn’t too much a stretch.
It was only three months after the release of Rochefort that Françoise, 25 at the time, was killed in a car crash, a moment that Deneuve says is her worst.
“The day I lost my sister, I lost my joy of living…it is the most painful thing that I have experienced,” she said in an interview with Paris Match, a weekly French magazine.
The loss of her sister wasn’t slowing down Deneuve, a femme fatale wrapped in Yves St Laurent, the icon of sixties glamor.
