high life    August 2001

The indiscreet charms of Sophie

Is Sophie Marceau the most desirable woman in the world ? 

Jasper Gerard visits the French actress's boudoir but gets distracted by politics, passion and literature

SEXUALLY SPEAKING, SCREEN sirens are said to smoulder; Sophie Marceau burns. No wonder Frenchmen voted her the woman with whom they would most like to sleep (or rather not sleep: that word is such a misnomer). Yet even more than spend a night alone with her, most men would love to be seen with her in a crowd. The flurry induced by my simple announcement, in the lobby of a fashionable London hotel, that I had an invitation to Ms Marceau's boudoir could hardly have been greater if I had said I had popped in to have a pint with the pontiff. Other than bragging you were there to collect your lottery jackpot, or your harem of centrefolds, no claim could rival such envy. For foolish men motivated by macho pride it is, well, a mighty fine feeling.

Her effect on men has little to do with her beauty. Sure, place the former Bond girl in a Miss World contest and she would surely win; but her allure lies elsewhere, perhaps in her fatal combination of an earthy sexuality and a highbrow mentality. As she strides over to shake my hand I try to ponder alt this, but I realise I'm so nervous I'm shaking as violently as Elvis's pelvis. Her lips part and I feel worse still. Even on the plainest women a French accent is sexy (and has laid more foreign men to waste than Napoleon's little Russian excursion), but on this goddess? It is not hard to see why her countrymen consider her the successor to mesdames Bardot, Deneuve and Adjani. It does flot matter that at 34, the first few, delicate lines are beginning to appear around the eyes, or that today her hair looks slightly mousy. She just has that indefinable quality that only a handful of women possess, even on the smartest catwalks. Added to which she has written a novel and can hold court with presidents (recently with that connoisseur of feminine aesthetics Bill Clinton, at the Hay on-Wye Festival, and longer ago with the late, equally energetic François Mitterand, who stormed out after Marceau attacked him over his beloved pyramid extension at the Louvre).

This, you quickly realise, is quite a lady. If nature is egalitarian, where on earth is she hiding her weak spots? Some British critics reckon they have found it: at that place where embarrassment is meant to be. The Times devoted its entire Pretentious, Moi? column to quotes from what publishers call her "brilliant debut novel", Telling Lies. Certainly, to literal English or American eyes, it does read in places like the florid prose of a 13-year-old girl who has stayed up a little too late, high on Existentialism and acid. The following is typical: "Confronted with children I turn into a statue of salt, encrusted in my own sins." As is: "The squirling design of the tomato sauce predicted that I wouldn't be in her film." And this is far from unusual: "The thought of life without life, exclusion." My student days were spent studying philosophy, yet I don't have a clue what she is burbling on about. Authors from Bellow to Tostoy are mentioned in the text, but it is not entirely clear what she has learned from such craftsmen.

"I am very lucky," she says. "My husband, well, we are not married, I call him my husband, he feels like my husband, but my partner..." [this is the much older Polish film director Andrzej Zulawski, with whom she has been entangled for 16 years since he directed her aged 18. There is a hint of Eliza/Professor Higgins in their relationship] "...he has been a great teacher." She slips out the last word with a luxurious sigh; even when she is talking about books, she conveys the impression of talking about sex. "He has taught me the best." Does that not make it a very unequal relationship? "It's great, it's like a child, you know," she says breezily. Not for her feminist protestations of equality, other than her contention that: "The relationship is balanced because to teach is to learn. The relationship is very rich. I've always known my opinions but I never knew how to formulate them before. It is a great gift."

Did she consider his review of her novel a great gift when he slated the book? She looks quite unruffled. "He has opinions about my work, and when I act he suffers even more. He sees me kissing whoever. He can't stand it, I hear him shouting in the kitchen," she laughs, which suggests that she indulges in celluloid infidelity to even up the relationship. "He always goes to watch me in a movie on his own. I never know when it is. And he believes in what he sees at the cinema and he is my companion so, yes, for him it must be very..." she trails off, with the trace of a smile.

Such tensions seem to help rather than hurt their partnership. "We have talked about getting married for years but we have always been too busy. But we talk about it more often now." Love across the stage set, she insists is far from unusual: "The only difference is that normally it only lasts for one movie." (They have worked together on five.) That it has survived is remarkable: Leonardo DiCaprio declared her the actress he would most like to star with, which was greeted with a typical Marceau comment: "That boy ? What would I play, his mother ?" Politics is one of her passions, and talking of Clinton suddenly transforms her from intimidating screen star to giggly girl. "God, you know, he bas been President of the United States !" Collecting herself, she adds: "He was a great president, I think. He is saying goodbye to the world. In fact, America is saying goodbye now because the new president just wants to close the door."

She talks with outrage about America's record on the environment and nuclear weapons, but then insists she is no longer political. "Since the birth of my son I have felt the need to close myself off in a safe pink world, because you are so sensitive and fragile." She is a European patriot and believes Britain and France present a good example to the world of moderate capitalism. "Wherever I am in the world, I might be in a country that is really young and exciting but then I think about Europe and I just remember its civilisation." She is particularly troubled on trips to Asia. "It has a great people and an amazing history, but I find it scary there, the way money has taken over. But here we are saved by our laziness, by the pubs and cigarettes." She asks if she thinks she should be allowed a smoke; what man could deny her? Is she proud f0 have become a symbol of France? "Yes, very. People worry that the identities of our countries are disappearing, but there is no way I am going to become German; my Frenchness is how I think, it is my roots."

This does not stop her attacking her country with wounding force. She is regularly at the centre of rows in Paris after she has attacked the French film industry. I ask her why she is so critical, pointing out that Britain would love to have France's reputation for cinema. "Yes, but that is because you don't have a film industry," she says bluntly, then realising her diplomatic blunder adds hastily: "Or at least not as you would like. Our industry just makes films about the French way. Perhaps now we do need to take a closer look at American film. French cinema inspired Hollywood, but it has stagnated. We have a complex in France. We don't talk about anything important."

From this she launches into an attack on France's failure to face guilt for its role in the Second World War. "If we did look, we would find lots of scandal. But Mitterand covered up the whole thing." she says, before suggesting that an unofficial censorship has prevented various films about the Resistance and Vichy being made. "When you look at the horror of that war, you should not hide it. Yet, I have never asked my grandfather what he did in the war for instance. In school we were taught what the Germans did, but not about what we did. Lots of them were involved in collaboration."

For several years, she lived mainly in Poland (the couple have a house in the countryside, just outside Warsaw) but with regular trips t0 America, principally Los Angeles, but now she is more reconciled to Paris. "lt's the logical place to be." Currently she is off America, perhaps after failing to land the mega role that would consolidate her name stateside. "I am in rejection mode at the moment with America, but I go up and down. Loneliness in Los Angeles can turn out like hell. Sometimes it can seem like the loveliest place on earth, the sun, the sea and interesting people to work with and everyone is talking about you, but then hell starts again."

She has, then, a rather self-centred view of America: when it loves her, she loves it; but when it is enraptured by another starlet she damns it as Satan. So how important is it to her to become a big Hollywood star ? "I would love it. They do recognise me in the street, and they are always very frendly and interested in my work. But you know, I will not compromise." But certain films, such as The World is Not Enough and Braveheart did seem like a compromise. "Certain movies you know you cannot refuse." She points out that in The World is Not Enough she played the first woman who has given 007 a run for his money.


Though she promises she is 'reconciled' to the film establishment after behaving herself on her last movie [La Fantôme du Louvre], she consents instantly when I ask if she is disillusioned with the film world. "Oh, yes. Writing is more rewarding, it's freer art, but it is hard work, the enormityv of all there is to describe, the mountains, everything." If her book is at all autobiographical, it is not hard to see why she has come to see film as facile. The most successful part of her novel describes a grim dinner with a sleazy, lustful film director. "Yes, that was fun writing about him," she dazzles, and in the smile you detect a thousand revenges for a million cinematic orders ("Show more leg, Sophie, pant louder", and so on). "l've met hundred of guys like this."

Though she enjoys other privileges, the beautiful actress shares with the prostitute a cynicism about men, seeing not their differences but their base similarities; principally, an ugly obsession about sex. "I think of oldness as a relief. I love that idea, of being a grandmother with all my family around me." And to think of all those Plain Janes wbo would give anything to be pounced on by a Pierce Brosnan or a Mel Gibson. With her existential reflecitons and dreamy demeanour she is as strange a siren as she is beguiling. Yet one cannot help but warm t0 someone who is so utterly without side. Co-stars are learning to dread her post-film interviews, during which she has said of John Malkovich, "he thinks he is very intellectual", of Sean Bean that, "he is very ordinary", and of Michelle Pfeiffer that she is "boring".

The first is perhaps a charge that could be levelled at Marceau; but not the last. Her book, like her beauty, is opaque. Is it autobiographical ? Even if it isn't, what the hell is it all about? And what is her story? It would take many more months in Marceau's boudoir to understand her: Mr Editor, could you arrange it please ?