No way out now for Jeanne

Bob Geldof's French actress girlfriend, Jeanne Marine, arrives stark naked. As in naked from the neck up, without even a slick of lippy on the heart-shaped little Emmanuelle Beart face.

Dear God, she has everything: wide-apart dark-blue eyes, a pout she must have learned in the pram, cheekbones like organ stops, blonde - very blonde - hair and the devotion of the world's most dishevelled Irishman, Bob Geldof. Is the woman completely perfect, dammit?

"I'm not a natural blonde," she admits, giggling and curling her legs neatly underneath her on the chair to display a blue-denimed rump that would make a butcher's eyes water. Cute, petite and a bottle-blonde to dye for - now where, in the context of Bob, have we seen that combination before?

We meet in a windowless, black-painted basement to talk about Jeanne's first-ever English-language role as the agnes b-clad sex-kitten Estelle in Huis Clos (No Way Out), Jean-Paul Sartre's claustrophobic vision of the after-life with added Frank Sinatra songs and an Eiffel Tower dress by agnes b in a new Riverside Studios production.

Hell really is other people, it seems, what with the ghostly presence of Paula Yates hovering like a spectre at the feast and the director, Fast Show actor Colin McFarlane, playing bodyguard and editor throughout the interview to protect her from Bobisms and talk up future film plans for the production.

Not that Jeanne needs nurse-maiding; if she doesn't like the question, the tiny Parisian who supplanted Paula in Sir Bob's famously unmade bed pretends not to understand.

But it must be true love, for Jeanne has gone loyally grunge to match her man while Geldof has been teaching her an Oirish version of English for her role in No Way Out. She lives in fear, apparently, of sounding like Peter Sellers, an occupational hazard for all French actors speaking English.

"Bob 'elped me with the lines because I was so afraid of sounding like Clouseau," she confides. "We went on a 'oliday and I said, 'Please, please 'elp me'. So he read all the parts to help me." What, even Inez the predatory lesbian who lusts after Estelle?

"Yes, even Inez. My part of Estelle, too. But he didn't do it in a high voice. Irishmen love talking. I can't fit my words into the conversation at all, I just listen. Then he says, 'What did you say?' So I have to repeat it twice. It's quite funny. I have to speak very rapidly when I'm with Bob - but the French are good at that. He's very stylish, he's very elegant, he's lovely. Like Estelle, I need to have men loving me, but I only need one man.

"I hope I've found him. I think he's very attractive. He's a handsome man; but I can't say the opposite, can I?" she adds artfully.