Emmanuelle Beart lights a cigarette and wraps her famous lips around it. Those lips about which I have been advised to ask no questions - certainly none with the word "collagen" in them. She inhales sharply, exhales poutingly and then turns to face me across the table at her publicist's Paris apartment.
"It was a strange mixture of a woman who is like porcelain and, at the same time, anchored in the ground," she says.
Beart is talking about Pauline, the character she plays in her new film, Les Destinees Sentimentales. But she might also be talking about herself. She looks like porcelain, with her long, thin, elegant neck, slender figure and large grey-blue eyes.
Like her fellow French actress Isabelle Adjani, Beart is ludicrously, even frostily, beautiful - despite her nondescript sweater, dubious feather cut (with its unfortunate fringe), and lack of make-up. I can't help looking at her, not necessarily with desire, but with astonishment to be confronted with someone so exceptionally good-looking.
Les Destinees Sentimentales is an adaptation by the accomplished French director, Olivier Assayas, of Jacques Chardonne's epic novel set in the Charente region of France over a 30-year period straddling the first World War. It's a very difficult book to adapt for the screen, not least because it has two focuses. First, there is a topically resonant story of the march of mass production and how this affects porcelain and cognac, two traditional industries in southwest France.
All very important, of course, but the difficulty Assayas never really surmounts is making these issues interesting on screen, and also wedding them to the other focus - the story of Protestant pastor Jean (played by Charles Berling), whose marriage to the viperous, damaged Nathalie (played wonderfully by Isabelle Huppert) is falling apart. In the middle of this torment, Jean glimpses Pauline across a crowded ballroom and sees in her the possibility of happiness.
Their subsequent 30-year relationship follows Beart from dewy-eyed ingenue to mature woman in a grey-haired wig. It's an unlikely role for Beart to have taken on, because it requires a very modest performance.
"I was afraid I wouldn't have the humility necessary to play the role of a woman who is only the wife of someone," she says. "I've played lots of roles that were excessive, women in the fires of passion.
"I found Pauline by abandoning myself to what Olivier wanted. In the ball scene near the very start of the film, I am playing Pauline aged 20. Now I'm 36, so I had to try to recall how I was at 18 years old, when I first fell in love. But it was mannered. "Then Olivier said: `This really isn't it at all.' It upset me and I went and stood in the corner with my fists clenched. But he was right. What he wanted was for Charles Berling and I to create something on the spot, rather than falling back on old tricks. I had to abandon all of those."
Beart lives in Paris with her partner, David Moreau, and her two children, eight-year-old Nelly and four-year-old Johan. Nelly's dad is the French actor Daniel Auteuil, with whom Beart had a decade-long relationship. She tries to be private but, in France at least, she often fails. "The press follow me. I sue them. That's the deal," she says.
She has been an ambassador for Unicef, and, more controversially, has lent her name to protests against anti-immigration legislation. As an actress, too, she tries to portray herself as anchored, a scrupulous performer who takes succour from the hard work necessary to create a character. In preparation for her performance in Claude Sautet's 1992 film Un Coeur en Hiver, she practised the violin for three hours a day for 18 months.
"I have a sense of work, a sense of duty and of things well done," she says, and her description of how she approached the part of Pauline is suggestive. "When I was preparing for this role, I never looked in the mirror. I had no notion of what I looked like. Let the others do the light, the hair, the make-up. The light is elsewhere: the light is in me." How extraordinary that an actress so renowned for her beauty should not look in the mirror for guidance.
Similarly, she doesn't like to see her old films. But, what a cast of characters they would be if they met for drinks and nibbles. There would be the girl she played aged 10 in her screen debut, a low-budget sci-fi drama called Demain les Momes (Tomorrow the Kids), about a group of children living in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
There would be the vengeful, enigmatic mountain girl of Claude Berri's 1986 Manon des Sources. There would be the recalcitrant artist's model from Jacques Rivette's 1991 film La Belle Noiseuse, a four-hour picture in which she was mostly nude, while Michel Piccoli's dubious painter did her picture, his creative (and no doubt other) juices flowing once more, after years of liquidity problems.
There would also be several characters she probably wouldn't count as friends, English-speaking ones mostly, but some characters from her early 1980s soft-porn flicks, too. And there would be a great many sophisticated Frenchwomen whom she would clasp proudly to her bosom - the violinist in Un Coeur en Hiver, the sensual amanuensis in Sautet's Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud, the love-torn woman in Regis Wargnier's 1995 melodrama, Une Femme Francaise.
It has been some career. But these are just memories. Now Emmanuelle has become Pauline, so much so that the actress who incarnated her has disappeared entirely.
"When I do an interview it always has the resonance of the character I have just played. I've been speaking to you as Pauline. If we do another interview, no doubt I'll be speaking like another character." That old ruse: the professional actress hiding behind her masks.
"I'd like to do an interview with the real Emmanuelle Beart, please. Perhaps in a month?" She switches from French to English. "OK. No problem. I'll ask her if she's free," she says coquettishly. "She might not be."
Beart speaks English well - most of it learned during her misbegotten dalliance with Anglo-Saxon cinema, which started in 1987 with Date With an Angel. It continued with Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible in 1996, in which she played Tom Cruise's moll.
For an actress who had by then played many meaty, mature roles, this seemed a barmy choice - made stranger because Juliette Binoche and Anne Parillaud had turned it down as too demeaning. Her performance got a real pasting.
"Mission: Impossible was really a curiosity for me," says Beart. "I always say `Why not?' I am a voyager - and the voyage cannot mean that I stay at home." Critics were scarcely any kinder about her performance in Elephant Juice. eart played a sophisticated Frenchwoman, very much against the grain of the rest of the picture. "I haven't seen it," she says flatly.
"It's not in my character to regret things," says Beart of these films, but then adds: "I have no more desire to play in Hollywood. I think my best work has been in France with great men. It's been my great fortune to work with really great men - with Olivier Assayas, Raoul Ruiz, Jacques Rivette. I am tutored by them.
"I think especially of the late Claude Sautet, from whom I learned such a great deal. I always recall he said that talent is 2 per cent talent and 98 per cent work. I always keep that in my head."
She must have kept that in her head when she worked on Ruiz's adaptation of the last volume of Proust, Le Temps Retrouve, two years ago. "When we filmed one scene, Raoul said, `I want to do it with you really tired.' So we did 40 takes and at the 40th I said, `I'm really tired, I want to go to bed.' And he said: `That's it. That's perfect.' And that last take was the one he used.
What are her ambitions now? "I have no particular desire to work at the moment, but that will pass. I will meet someone and have the desire to see them again, and end up working with them. That's what happened with Raoul and Olivier."
As I leave, she says, almost flirtatiously, "Say something nice to me in English." All I can manage is: "I usually really hate interviewing celebrities, but you weren't so bad." "That'll do," she says. "You can go now." I wonder if this Pauline, Emmanuelle, whoever she was, will want to see me again. Probably not.
Les Destinees Sentimentales opened at the Irish Film Centre yesterday