The original sinner

It is lunchtime in the ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and a man is warming up chicken fillets for Jane March. Not the kind you eat, but those funny silicon pads that can be stuffed down a bra - preferably after they have been heated up with a hairdryer. By the age of 30, most of us have filled out enough not to require extra padding, but despite reaching that age, Miss March remains disconcertingly waif-like. 'It would be nice to put on a bit of weight,' she tells me later, having declined to order from the lunch menu.

There is something just a little bit contrary about Jane March, which is what French film director Jean-Jacques Annaud liked when he first spotted her picture on the cover of Just Seventeen. She was 'this little girl with a faintly bored air and the look of revolt in her eyes,' he said, a look he knew he could exploit in his adaptation of The Lover, Marguerite Duras' autobiographical novel based on her own seduction by a wealthy Chinese man in colonial Saigon.

Jane was only 18 when she shot the movie, and 19 when it was released in Britain in 1992. She gave a subtle performance - astonishingly so for someone without any acting experience - but all that was overshadowed by the hype surrounding her steamy love scenes with Tony Leung. Such was their 'erotic authenticity' that rumours began that there had been no acting involved. Annaud did nothing to end the speculation - 'Whether it is simulated or experienced is of little importance to me,' he said deviously. Jane was quickly dubbed 'the sinner from Pinner', after the staid London suburb where she grew up.

'It went on and on for years,' she says now. 'I'm tempted to get it tattooed somewhere - if I thought there was any truth in it I would.'

So she can laugh about it now? 'Yes, but at the time it was just all very serious. I don't think The Lover would even have an impact now - it's become very hard to shock people.' I suggest that the film itself wasn't particularly eye-boggling, only the gossip. She looks a little cross. 'It was considered quite shocking at the time, or I wouldn't have been hauled over the coals quite as much.' In the hype that preceded the film's release, Annaud rather ungallantly suggested that Jane had been a virgin when he cast her, but had gained some experience before they shot the film.

Was it scary making a sexual film at such a young age? 'No. I was very confident going in. I never did a scene where I didn't know what it was about. But looking back I do surprise myself. The things I've done! Oh God, my poor parents. What I've put them through.'

Both she and her parents were 'overwhelmed' by the publicity, she says. Jane's background was portrayed as incredibly humble. In fact, Bernard Horwood (Jane's full name is Jane March Horwood) was teaching design and technology at a local secondary school when the film came out. He and Jane's mother, Jean, still live in their nice semi in Pinner.

But if Jane felt under attack after the furore surrounding The Lover, it didn't stop her heading for Hollywood to star opposite Bruce Willis in an even raunchier film, Color of Night. During the shoot she fell in love with one of the film's producers, Carmine Zozzora. Just two months after their first date he proposed and they flew by private jet to Lake Tahoe, marrying in the Dream-Maker wedding chapel. She was only 20, he was 35 and a Hollywood hotshot. Besides being a producer on the film, he was also the head of Bruce Willis's production company Flying Heart.

After they were married, Zozzora put Jane in another film, the 1996 spy thriller Provocateur, for which he was executive producer. But after that everything went very quiet surrounding Jane March.

In fact, there had barely been a peep from her for a decade when she suddenly showed up at the World Music Awards in Monte Carlo last year, wearing some large rocks from Chopard. One juicy piece of gossip had it that Jade Jagger threw a hissy fit, having believed that Jane would wear Garrard. Jane smiles at the story. 'It's not true. First of all, I don't argue with anyone,' she says. 'And I don't think anyone's really that rude.'