GQ 1991.02

Sophie so good

"I'm not fragile," she says. "I am a very physical person." Well, quite. At 23, Sophie Marceau is one of France's most bankable screen sirens. Along with Beatrice Dalle and the two Isabelles - Adjani and Huppert - she is a guaranteed boxoffice sensation with her doe-eyed douceur and provocative languor. But her pulling power was not always thus. When just thirteen, Marceau, daughter of a café waiter, was picked from among 200 cuddly pre-pubescents to star in Claude Pinoteau's two charmingly vacuous comedies, «La Boum» and «La Boum 2». Their huge, immediate success won her an audience of millions and overnight celebrity as the symbol of France's rootless youth culture, the avatar of "jeunesse sans histoire". Inevitably, though, her teen star image metamorphosed into smoky starlet, and by 1986 she was playing a sullen, deceitful drug-dealer opposite Gérard Depardieu in Maurice Pialat's «Police». Adding to her mystique, there is also her involvement, artistic and emotional, with the volatile Polish director Andrzej Zulawski. He had seen Marceau on screen at Cannes, allen in love with her, of course, and offered her a part in his next film: «L'Amour Braque (Crazy Love)», a modern-day version of Dostoevsky's «The idiot». Thus, she joined his celluloid harem - past members including Romy Schneider, Isabelle Adjani, Valerie Kaprisky - with whom Zulawski enjoyed short-lived affairs as well as temnpestuous relations on the set. But, unsurprisingly, Marceau has proved more durable than the rest, and years on she and Zulawksi are still together, still living quietly in the countryside outside Paris, still making films with and without each other. One project apart: earlier this year, Marceau starred on the Paris stage in her most difficult gamble to date, Jean Anouilh's «Eurydice». Still to come, this April, she features prominently in «For Sasha», Alexandre Arcady's autobiographical drama about French students working as kibbutz volunteers who are caught up in the Six-Day War. With a dozen films so far, and counting, she may no longer be a naïf and not quite an ingenue, but when it comes to the notion of Gallic gamines, there are none who are more so than Sophie Marceau.