'My personality is addictive on every level'

Interview

Carole Bouquet is the former Bond girl and Chanel model whose life is a source of constant fascination in her native France. She captivated Gerard Depardieu, had her phone bugged by Francois Mitterand and was recently accused of having an affair with President Sarkozy. Here the actress talks candidly about drugs, powerful men and her new-found political activism

If there's a theme that has recurred in her conversation over the years, I suggest to Carole Bouquet, it is that life can be a swine when you're lovely. "And every time you're reported as mentioning that," I tell the actress, "I find myself thinking: OK. Beautiful is hard. So try plain. Try hideous. Try one-armed."

"I don't think I ever made that remark in the way that you're suggesting. I don't think I was quoted correctly."

"So how old were you when you noticed that you were - to borrow the phrase that Gerard Depardieu addresses to you in Bertrand Blier's 1979 classic, Buffet Froid - 'staggeringly beautiful?"'

The former face of Chanel lowers first her eyes, then her voice. "I didn't write those words."

Bouquet, now 50, is one of France's more reluctant icons. She has had reason to be grateful for her nation's stringent privacy laws: never more so than in the immediate aftermath of her eight-year relationship with Depardieu, which ended in 2005. We're talking over lunch at her regular table in the Paris Ritz, where she arrived a couple of minutes early, wearing an elegant but understated dark sweater.

"Is it Chanel?"

"No. This," she replies, "is... a pullover. And these," she adds helpfully, "are a pair of brown trousers."

She's often assumed to be tall, possibly because of her years in modelling, where, as tradition requires, she generally seems to be looking down at you with a kind of smouldering disdain; actually she can be no more than 5ft 6in. But in her modest outfit, and a pair of round-rimmed spectacles, Bouquet still turns every head in the room.

It has taken her a while to become accustomed to such attention. As a young girl, she says, "What bothers you isn't so much whether you're beautiful or not. What bothers you is the way that people stare."

"People?"

"OK, men."

"So that dislocates your normal relationship with the world?"

"Exactly. You get stared at the whole time. I first noticed that when I was about 13. I was very shy. Being considered beautiful, I always felt that people were waiting for something more. I imagined you were supposed to have an intellectual ability - and I'm making no claims here - proportional to your supposed good looks. I think that's what I meant when I was talking about beauty. I felt I should be proving I deserved the attention; that I should be doing something special."

If remarkable achievement was what they expected of her, even the teenage Bouquet's most hopeful admirers must have been surprised at quite how spectacularly she has delivered. A former philosophy student at the Sorbonne, she made her screen debut at 18, in Luis Buuel's That Obscure Object of Desire, before blossoming as an actress under the tutelage of Depardieu's mentor and French cinema's dark genius, Bertrand Blier. Buffet Froid ends with Bouquet face to face with Depardieu, in a rowing boat. He asks her if she'll allow him to dedicate his life to her; she shoots him with a small- calibre handgun. In Blier's Trop Belle Pour Toi (Too Beautiful For You) she plays Depardieu's wife; the film's conceit is that he abandons Bouquet for his considerably rounder secretary, played by Josiane Balasko. There are moments in these scripts when art seems to anticipate life.

"When I was working with Gerard," Bouquet says, "he was married. I never wanted to steal him. The idea never occurred to me." She speaks in quietly articulated, very un-actorish French, occasionally delivering a phrase in English. It's one of the sadnesses of her career that her greatest roles, such as her interpretation of Resistance heroine Lucie Aubrac, in Claude Berri's 1997 film of the same name, received little or no distribution in North America or the UK. In Britain, she's still best known for a fleeting appearance in Francis Ford Coppola's contribution to New York Stories, and as Roger Moore's companion in the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only. ("No fun," says Bouquet.)

Since then, Bouquet, unlike her most famous ex-lover, has been highly discriminating in the roles she has accepted. "The first time I met Depardieu, in the late 1980s," I tell her, "he said, and I quote him precisely, that: 'I will never, ever, make crap films for money.' Have you seen him in Bimboland?"

"I'd love to make a Buffet Froid or a Lucie Aubrac every year. But we all make mistakes. Sometimes in life you need money and you make choices which are, er..."

Depardieu - the greatest French actor of his, or, some of us would argue, any other generation - has somehow turned into a man who could get recognised on any street corner in the world, so long as he was wearing his Obelix costume. Bouquet is currently playing, to glowing reviews, in Racine's tragedy Berenice at the small but prestigious Parisian theatre Les Bouffes du Nord, famous as the adopted home of British director Peter Brook. But it's not her stage work that has had her on the front page of every French newspaper over the past few months.