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A FRENCH national icon was pulled from its pedestal in Paris last week as a book accused Catherine Deneuve, the screen idol, of being the “grasping” and “manipulative” daughter of a Nazi collaborator in the second world war.

In an abrupt departure from the usual pandering to French superstars, the biography ripped into Deneuve, France’s best known actress, as being driven by money and an obsession with secrecy that has turned her private life into an “impenetrable fortress”.

Known for an icy exterior, Deneuve, who turns 64 this week, tried in vain to block the biography. Its appearance in shops last week followed her acknowledgment in 2005, after strenuous denials, that she had accepted large sums of cash in exchange for appearances at parties held by a shadowy Algerian businessman.

“She’s not a particularly happy woman,” said Bernard Violet, the book’s author. He has so much of a track record as an iconoclastic biographer that Alain Delon, the playboy actor, sued before Violet had written one line of a book about him, although the biography eventually made it into print.

The portrayal of Deneuve seemed a far cry from the public’s vision of her as the embodiment of French femininity: she was once the model for official statues of Marianne, symbol of the republic. Instead Violet paints her as a tough businesswoman who can be “cruel and unjust” to associates.

“Destroying the Deneuve myth” was how one newspaper summed up the book in a headline on Thursday. It is not all negative, however. The book suggests that Deneuve represents everything outsiders find attractive about France: “The fire beneath the ice . . . fragile, haughty, bourgeois, classy.”

The revelation about her father being a “collabo”, as collaborators were known, was based on documents that Violet unearthed in the national archives in Paris and will come as a shock to legions of fans and an embarrassment to Deneuve, who has a reputation for involvement in left-wing and humanitarian causes.

Maurice Dorléac, an actor, was paid at least £10,000 to lend his voice to antiEnglish and antisemitic programmes broadcast on Radio-Paris, which the Nazis set up as an antidote to the BBC’s Radio Londres.

This made Deneuve’s participation in The Last Metro, a film by François Truffaut set in a Parisian theatre during the occupation, seem particularly ironic. In it, Deneuve plays the courageous wife of a Jewish theatre director who struggles to keep him concealed from the Nazis in their cellar while she directs plays on his behalf.

Only a small proportion of the French took a stand against the Vichy regime that helped the Nazis during the second world war. Dorléac’s collaboration was less surprising than the fact that it had taken so long to come out, particularly since he was sentenced by a civil court after the war to a period of “public ignominy” which meant that he could not work in the theatre for six months.

Deneuve, writes Violet, is adept at manipulating the media, “throwing them scraps” from time to time to create an illusion of intimacy while revealing nothing about herself.

He suggests that the tragic death of Françoise Dorléac, Deneuve’s glamorous elder sister and a former model for Dior, provided a smokescreen for their father’s war record.

Hiding behind the undeniable grief caused by her sister’s death in a car crash in 1967, Deneuve cultivated a posture of aloofness that few have dared to breach.

In his comparison of the two sisters, Catherine comes out badly. “Françoise was intuitive, spontaneous, impulsive and filled with talent,” writes Violet. “Catherine is a secretive, highly calculating and determined woman.”

The book tries to shed light on some of the mystery surrounding a love life about which she never speaks: Deneuve succeeded Brigitte Bardot as the lover of Roger Vadim, the film director, at the age of 17 before replacing Bardot, in 1985, as the model for Marianne.

Her acceptance of cash from Abdelmoumen Khalifa, an Algerian entrepreneur, to attend parties was part of a wider practice of French stars, including Gérard Depardieu, of charging for public appearances, says Violet.

Deneuve, regarded as one of the greatest of French actresses, also has her own company, Deneuve SA, which has turned her image into an industry for selling perfume and jewellery.

The sharp-nosed businesswoman described by Violet goes against the grain of the image that Deneuve presents of herself as being hopeless at making - or managing – money.

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