How Binoche breaks the mould

I think I do. "We have very intense lives. You can't ask an actor or an actress to be a perfect couple for years and years."

She had a little affair ("Is that what you call it?") with Daniel Day-Lewis while filming The Unbearable Lightness and a son, Raphael, with André Halle, a scuba diver she met while filming the occasionally aquatic Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in 1991. On Horseman on the Roof, four years later, she took up with Martinez. I say Shirley MacLaine believes "f***ing on location doesn't count".

"It depends how you f***. I don't know," she says, but wants me to know there's an austerity to film work too: "It is like sport, you have to have discipline, health, good energy, know your line, know your mark."

I assume she resisted her love interest on Chocolat, Johnny Depp, who plays a raggletaggle Romany Romeo. She scowls and wants to know why everyone asks about him. I say it is because all the girls says he is the numberone alpha male on the planet and every beta-gamma boy wonders what he has that they don't. "Well," she explains, as if to a child, "he's so beautiful. He's like a sculpture, a painting almost. Also because he has a mixture of Indian blood or something, I don't know exactly. Physically, I think it's his eyes. His black eyes are kind of attractive because you wonder what he thinks and what he feels."

In different circumstances would she have fallen in love with him? "It's very hard to answer this question because I live with someone," she replies, diplomatic towards both parties.

In Britain, understandably, Juliette Binoche is best known for her work in English-language movies: the cultish Unbearable Lightness in 1988, the absurd Damage in 1991, her disastrous Cathy in Wuthering Heights in 1992 and then, in 1997, the triumph of The English Patient, in which she played his nurse, Hana. Binoche won an Oscar and celebrated by coming to London to star in Pirandello's Naked at the Almeida for £255 a week. On the Continent, however, she has a separate, more artsy career, beginning with Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary in 1985.

In 1986, the director Leos Carax fell under her spell. Carax has a weakness for plots containing secret serums and miracle cures and, back then, an even greater weakness for the 22-year-old Juliette, whom he appointed not only his girlfriend but his muse. He has said that on Mauvais Sang he showed the "boyish" Binoche that she was a beautiful woman, and Binoche agrees. "I was denying it, I think. I was probably denying my femininity and Leos helped me open up and allow it. I enjoyed it because it was through his eyes, through love." Nevertheless, filming was so intense that when it finished she escaped to Colombia, read a book a day and rode horses in the mountains. She compares her retreat to how her character Julie, after she is widowed in Three Colours Blue, removes herself completely from the life she is leading.

Four years later, however, she was back with Carax on Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, playing Michèle, an eye-patched artist living rough on the Parisian bridge. It was a terrible, three-year shoot. To get into character she would sleep outside. Then the money would dry up. Months would pass and then she would be forced to be homeless again. "There was a moment I couldn't stand it any more, because it was so traumatic," she says. She became depressed, feared she was committing professional suicide, yet felt compelled, as an act of faith, to continue.

"It was an experience in my life that really changed me. Made me transform. It was my Chocolat," she says. By the end she was stronger and more confident - forceful enough to impose a happy ending in which Michèle and her vagrant lover escape Paris on a barge up the Seine.

"It wasn't Leos's idea, actually, but for me it was a necessity. Actually, he didn't want it to have a happy ending, but I said to him I was going to leave him! That was how I got my way."

And then she left him anyway, I say. "At the end of the shooting," she says, without blushing.

Since then, Andre the frogman has been succeeded by Martinez and he by Benoit Magimel, Hanna's father. They also met on set, during her 1999 biopic of George Sand, Les Enfants du Siècle, in which he played the novelist's lover Alfred de Musset. They live in her home outside Paris.

"I am very romantic. I wish it was going to be like this ..." For ever? "Until I die, probably. I don't know about 'for ever'. I believe in eternity but I don't know about couples' lives in another world."

When Binoche talks this way it is hard to tell whether she is being facetiously pedantic, spiritual or both. Chocolat, The Movie, tones down the opposition in Joanne Harris's original novel between cocoa bean and church, but the question of religion clearly persists for Binoche. She reads the Bible, the Koran and Buddhists texts, but she does not go to church herself.

Because she doesn't need a man in black to tell her about the afterlife? "I don't need a man to tell me how I should behave," she says. If I were her I would be pleased that in Harris, whose home in Barnsley she visited (and who she discovered was born on the same day), she for once had a down-to-earth woman collaborator. I remind her of Téchiné's and Kieslowski's infatuated praise and of what Louis Malle, the director of Damage, said: "There's a darkness in her and something very mysterious as well."

"They were just promoting their movies," she says. "It doesn't matter to me. Truth is just a point of view. Maybe there was darkness in me because doing Damage I was so miserable. The second part of the film, though, I felt very light inside. I found my way to the light because I had to find my way to survive it."

Ah yes, I say, she did not get on with her co-star, Jeremy Irons. He was meant to have plunged his tongue throatward in a love scene. "Yes, he was being provocative. It was a long time ago, but I said in a newspaper a year ago, I always admired Jeremy's intelligence as an artist. He has something special." One day they must get together and talk about what went wrong.

As she ages - and she turns 37 next week - blokes will better appreciate the strength and subtlety of the talent beneath her beauty. In coming years there will be less talk of her dark mystery from directors who egg her into shower scenes and then allow her nudity to sell their films.

"It takes so much, as an actor, to forget your prudity and all that. When suddenly they want to use it in a different way it's disgusting. I found it completely perverse," she says. Next time, there'll need to be a very good reason to strip.

And, of course, no woman is a goddess to her looking glass. As Julie says in Three Colours Blue: "I am like any other woman. I sweat. I cough. I have cavities."

"Exactly, of course, I do," Binoche says, and, having met her, I can append to the list violent leg-scratching, a noisy way with phlegm and a nomination for the dirtiest laugh in France.

I wish her luck with the imminent Oscar announcement. "Is that a bless or a curse?" she smiles, momentarily mistaking me for someone who likes his actresses inscrutably packaged in enigma and paradox. Whatever. At 1.32pm and 30 seconds, the Academy Awards website posts the news that she has been short-listed for Best Actress - telling us both, I am sure, what we want to hear.