Marina Hands: Show of Hands

French cinema is chock-a-block with wonderful leading ladies – from Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert to Emmanuelle Béart and Juliette Binoche. Now, though, a new generation, led by Marina Hands, is delighting French audiences. And Hands' reputation was cemented when she scooped France's top acting award, the César, for her performance in Lady Chatterley.

Pascale Ferran's interpretation of DH Lawrence's notorious tale is based on the penultimate draft of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lawrence scholars refer to this as John Thomas and Lady Jane, which were the pet names the clandestine lovers called each other. In this shorter draft, there seems to be a lot more sex and less dialogue, as many of the subplots that appear in the later version are not included. The film follows suit, except that all the actors are French, speaking French, but clearly playing English characters.

Hands has the perfect credentials for such a role – her father is the British theatre director Terry Hands and her mother is Ludmila Mikaël, who starred in Claude Sautet's 1974 classic Vincent, François, Paul... et les autres and Noce blanche. "Maybe that is why Pascale wanted me for the role," she says. "She thought that there was something about me that would give the part an attitude that would not feel French, although I don't feel British at all. But then to French people, I'm not French at all. I definitely have that second-generation syndrome and I have fun with it, actually. But it was tough growing up."

Hands has a special ability to look different in every role, and she entered Robert De Niro territory by piling on the pounds to play Lady Chatterley. There are not many actresses who, knowing that they're about to spend a chunk of screen time frolicking naked, would agree to a diet of burger and chips. The connections to De Niro don't end there; Hands was awarded best actress at his TriBeCa Film Festival. It seems, though, that the actress was the last to know of her success. "I was working in the theatre [the Comédie-Française] when the TriBeCa festival was going on. One day I received an email saying that I'd won the best actress prize. I tried to call Pascale, who was in New York, to confirm this, but she's not very good with mobiles so I got no response. For days I was sitting there thinking this is a joke until finally I got in touch with someone from the production team who confirmed that I'd won."

The 31-year-old may be winning plaudits now but, growing up, she never intended to follow her parents into the acting business; in fact, she wanted to be an equestrienne. She was in the French junior horse-riding team with the actor and director Guillaume Canet. The pair recently revisited their past when they appeared as riders in Tell No One, adapted by Canet from Harlan Coben's crime novel.

She says: "When Guillaume asked me to take on that role, he was really remembering what we had been through and what our first passion was. I didn't allow myself to think about acting for a very long time because of my parents and how successful they were. The trouble was that I was not good enough to go professional, so I had to quit. It was quite heart-breaking, because from the age of five I'd been living in the world of horses and living a little girl's dream. But in the end, I failed."

Hands laughs at the thought of her "failure", because the end of her riding career was the catalyst for her going off to drama school and overcoming her fear of following in her mother's footsteps. She says: "I had such a hard time, not because of my dad – because he was a director and that was different. But as my mum was a very successful and respected theatre actress I thought that people would not take me seriously. They'd think I was only acting because my parents had connections and it would be easier for me than others to get jobs."

Her parents split when she was young, so Hands would spend summers visiting her dad in England. "He was working so much at the time that he'd just bring me along. I'd be sitting in rehearsals and seeing my dad speak to actors and hear the advice he would give and then I'd watch plays all the time, not just the ones that he put on. I didn't understand anything because I was so little, but I was influenced by my father's work and also the British stage. I remember seeing Jeremy Irons, Ralph Fiennes and Niamh Cusack, who I was a big fan of."

Now, it's the daughter who is eating up all the column inches. She is incredibly natural on-screen, even when naked. She says of the nudity in Lady Chatterley: "I could have been worried about it if it was with another director. This kind of stuff really depends on the person that you are working with – I know that Pascale didn't want to make it scandalous, because these days to be really provocative you have to go really far. It wasn't so explicit and in a way it is quite prudish because when they make love she doesn't take her clothes off for a very long time.

"In the relationship, Lady Chatterley is on a voyage of discovery. I thought it would be amazing to show how difficult it is for this woman to let everything go and let this man touch her. It is also a very beautiful journey for an actress and we tried hard to ensure that it was not a very fantasised version of this sex goddess. We hope that women who watch this film feel like it has happened to them or could happen to them."

Now that the Lady Chatterley star has entered public consciousness, she's determined not to fall off the radar. We'll next see her in Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and later as Coco Chanel in a film by Exorcist director William Friedkin. "That should be an experience," she exclaims, before adding, "we're all intrigued by why Friedkin wants to make this. We start shooting in October and it is a European production with no American actors. I know quite a lot about [Coco] and I was attracted to her in the way that you can become fascinated by some artists. I'm very attracted to women of destiny who, at a certain moment in time, break the rules and start to truly be free of speech and free of action."

One of the pitfalls of her recent success is that Hands has had to quit performing with the Comédie-Française, the French state theatre. The chance to work with directors she admires is the big draw of cinema. She even admits that if the right one came along she'd do a trashy part that she hated: "There are certain things that I would find difficult to do, but I'm fascinated by directors. It is an amazing job. I wouldn't be able to do it myself. I would be so bad, but I have a real sense of committing to the director's point of view and sort of helping him say what he wants to say.

"I think it is an amazing relationship and it is very gratifying for an actor – and much more gratifying for an actor sometimes than performing for an audience in theatre. A lot of people will say actors like the theatre because they can play to an audience. It can be nice, but I just feel very useful when a director likes me and wants me to work with him."

And there's a host of directors ready to make use of Hands.

'Lady Chatterley' opens on 24 August