Carry On Emmanuelle

There is no doubt that Emmanuelle Béart is phenomenally beautiful. What you don't bargain for, until you meet her, is how close she is to being a parody of beauty. All the important features are somehow out of proportion - big eyes, huge lips, vast hair - like on a doll or in a cartoon.

It's a fantasy face, so its owner is well cast in Nathalie. She plays a prostitute hired by a woman to seduce a husband who dismisses his casual adulteries as mere bagatelles. Her job is to have the sex, and report back. Béart is aware of the similarities between her job and her character's. 'It's a parallel you can make. There is this idea that you sell yourself and sometimes don't do it for pleasure.

You say, "I've been paid, I'm going to go to the finish." The decision wasn't just, "Oh, Nathalie is a good part." It was more perverse than that. People always talk about my body and my face as having quite a sexual image. And I wanted to take these things to the limit, to say, "You find something sexual in me, but I am going to see how far I can explore that part of my soul and my body, to play with this body, use this body with the camera."'

In short, there are bags of nudity, as there have been for Béart - one of this year's Cannes Judges - ever since she played the goatherd in Manon Des Sources almost 20 years ago, most notably in La Belle Noiseuse and Une Femme Française. She is now 39 and not remotely concerned with reining in her sexuality, just because her two children walk past film posters of her wearing not much. 'I have to explain to them why I do it. But I never want to stop making the choices I make because of my children. That's important.' Her children have different fathers. Nelly, 14, is by Daniel Auteuil, her co-star in Manon. Johan, eight, is by music producer David Moreau. They both live nearby. A relationship with film producer Vincent Meyer was said to be coming to an end when he committed suicide just over a year ago. Naturally, she will not talk about this. All she will say is that when she is not working, she is 'a full-time mother.

I do only very, very normal things in life.'

She knows what it's like to be the daughter of a celebrity because her father, Guy Béart, was a famous balladeer. 'I was ashamed.

I just couldn't deal with it. In the street everybody was looking at him and asking him questions. I always felt how awful it is to be well-known. My daughter is very at ease with it. My son --perhaps it's something to do with the relationship between boys and their mothers - doesn't like it. He said a lovely thing last time. "You don't have any shame." It's not true. I do have shame. But the more you try to hide, the more people see you. The stars who go out with sunglasses and a hat, people say, "Who is this person behind the glasses and the hat?"'

Béart has lent her name to good causes, confronting the Chirac government over asylum seekers, marching against Le Pen and lobbying for a ban on Muslim headscarves in schools, which she sees as a visible symbol of the suppression of women. She also makes annual trips for UNICEF. 'I've just come back from Sierra Leone. It's something that really I could never give up. Once you have opened your eyes, you can't close them.'

Charity work fulfils a childhood ambition, when growing up on a farm with her mother, a former model, and four siblings in the south of France. 'In class they would ask you what you wanted to do later and I was always putting "a traveller".' That could have been one of several classrooms - she changed schools five times. 'I was very difficult. I didn't know what to do with myself. The memory I have is I was very violent, actually. I couldn't talk to people like I do today. I felt very lonely. I don't know exactly what happened.' At 15, she was sent to Montreal to babysit and learn English. 'I loved it,' she says. 'It saved me.'

She answers questions mostly in French, but the good idiomatic English that she breaks into frequently didn't save her from a drubbing for her performance in Mission: Impossible. 'I didn't understand anything. The part was not very good, actually, so it was pretty difficult. I've been spoilt in France.'

Perhaps her childhood difficulties stemmed not only from her parents' separation soon after her birth, but from a combustible mixture of genes. 'I don't have a drop of French blood. I'm from a mother who is Greek and Italian, and my father is Russian and Spanish. But I am a child of the south.' Manon, which she shot in Provence after flitting through drama school and film-acting classes, 'was like going home'. But it was also 'a faux-beau role that would have imprisoned me in a cage - a gilded one, but still a cage. At the time I had that sort of physique - with big blue eyes - ideal for being enclosed in a cage. So I escaped.