Emmanuelle Béart: 'The image is not me'

Emmanuelle Béart says we don't see enough of her films to appreciate that she is an actress - not a pin-up

Emmanuelle Béart arrives at our tête-à-tête in a Paris hotel room with her nine-year-old son, Johan, clasping her hand. She takes five minutes with him behind closed doors, and when I'm beckoned in, Johan is sitting calmly in the corner of the room playing with a video camera. Béart sits on the sofa looking as immaculate as ever, in a black suit. Now 40, she could, and on celluloid often does, pass for 10 to 15 years younger.

At first, it is off-putting having Béart's son in the room. His father is the music producer David Moreau, whom Béart was married to after she split with the actor Daniel Auteil, her first husband and father of her 13-year-old daughter, Nelly. Officially, she is currently single.

My first thought is that bringing her son is a ploy to avoid talking about her image as a siren or other matters that might be considered delicate. It's a fear compounded by the fact that the interview is to be conducted in French, even though Béart, having lived in Montreal in her youth, speaks excellent English. The apprehension is misplaced, as Béart proves candid.

Having her son there fits nicely with her role in André Téchiné's Strayed. Set during the Second World War, the film stars Béart as a mother who, with her two children, flees occupied Paris. An aerial bombardment forces them to abandon their car and the road. They hide out in an abandoned cottage. Their tranquillity is disturbed by the arrival of a tenacious youth. Téchiné then begins to toy with the image of the actress by having her be the far older partner in a budding romance. The boy's friendship with Béart grows to such an extent that the British Board of Film Classification asked whether he was 18 when he shot the scenes. It turns out he was only 17.

Fully aware of her image as a sex symbol, Béart was happy to let Téchiné manipulate this image, just as she allowed François Ozon to put her in a French maid's outfit for 8 Women. For Téchiné, it was important to have someone who could be the mother of secondary-school children and at the same time a credible object of lust for a teenager. Playing the older partner also appealed to Béart, as it flipped the coin on the image of her that was drilled into the public consciousness in Manon des Sources.

"I'm always playing against type and breaking the image of Emmanuelle Béart," she says. "In England you don't always see certain films that I do this in. There was a film called Les Enfants du Désordre where I play a drug addict." It's when talking about her own image that Béart gives the impression that she is talking by rote. "Right now, I think that there is a glamorous image. It is the image of the press, of magazine covers. But if you look at my filmography, these images are broken. The point of acting is to get into someone else's shoes. If all I'd done in by career is be like the girl in Manon des Sources all the time, I'd be really very unhappy. In fact, I'd no longer be an actress."

In France, Béart has had far more success in convincing the public that she is more than a pretty face. For a decade, she was the French ambassador to Unicef, a role that had her trying to focus media attention on the plight of children around the globe until 2004. In France, she was arrested for defending the rights of immigrants without official papers - an arrest that saw her lose a contract with Christian Dior.

As she is keen to point out, you have to be doing something more than pouting your lips on screen and being a media celebrity to have directors of the calibre of Claude Sautet, Jacques Rivette and Téchiné wanting to work with you on more than one occasion. The first time that Béart worked with Téchiné was on J'embrasse Pas, in 1991. She shot Strayed with him in 2004. She is scheduled to do a third film, Les Témoins, with Téchiné later this year.

For Béart, the director is the most important character in a movie. "In choosing a film, the first thing I do is look into the eyes of the director. I'm searching for their look, their desire, and then I take a drink with them to see if I really want to take another drink with them again, sometime in my life. I think that it is because I place such importance on my relationship with the director that in my life I've done some really bad films with directors who are great. But what is important for me is not how good the film is, but if I have fun in the two months of my life that I've worked on it. I can do 150 films and there may only be five that are memorable, but every actor knows they must work."

I was surprised by the reaction of Béart when I tell her that I didn't like L'Enfer (Hell), which finds its way on to British screens next week. Out of the blue, Béart starts chatting in English. "Yes, that's true, I know what you mean, and it's too bad."

Hitting 40 has made her reassess life a bit. The regret that she admits to having about her career is not making more films outside France. Her English-language appearances have been playing the French bitch in Mission: Impossible and playing to type in the little-watched Date with an Angel. It's something she's trying to change. "I've just finished filming a thriller called A Crime with Harvey Keitel. It's so great to play in another language. It's like opening another window and being able to breathe something different. I loved being a New Yorker for two months."

But the time in New York had to end as soon as shooting was over, so that Béart could return to her most important duty, being a mother.

'L'Enfer' opens on 21 April