In search of Vanessa Paradis

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10 April 2012

Vanessa Paradis can't resist Christmas. We kind of go overboard,' she admits. I'd like to say we aren't materialistic, but, you know, all those presents round the tree, those colours, that magical sight – you want that for your kids. We do tend to want to make it spectacular.'

By we' she is referring to herself and her long-term partner, Johnny Depp. He's no slouch when it comes to buying presents, either. The best present she ever received came from him, a few years ago. It's a chain; it's not fancy jewellery, not precious jewellery, it's just a little metal heart' – her voice hushes, and she leans closer – that used to belong to Marilyn Monroe. That's the best, materially. No question.'

Paradis, singer, actress and model, has been a devoted fan of Monroe since she was a child. She currently has the recent biography by J Randy Taraborrelli on her bedside table. Anything new about Marilyn, I'm on to it,' she says and smiles a faraway smile. We're very privileged. Yeah. I want my kids to understand that. I think they do.' Our glimpse of the charmed life of Vanessa, Johnny, Jack, seven, and Lily-Rose, ten, started when she arrived, late and unchaperoned, for the ES photo shoot at the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Los Angeles, one of the cities where she and Depp have a home. I'm sorry. I've been walking round these corridors for so, so long – completely lost!' she says.

She is tiny, even in her high-wedged ankle boots, and exquisite. You want to put her on top of the Christmas tree. She has the high forehead of a porcelain doll, and something of a doll's imperious, unimpressed expression – until her eyes flash with humour and she breaks into a zany gap-toothed laugh.

This is the woman of whom Johnny Depp says: I finally found a reason to exist in this world. When you have a fantastic woman and two beautiful children, there's not much room for feeling cynical.' They both describe their first meeting in terms of a lightning flash, or coup de foudre. I was standing in a hotel in Paris and I saw this back,' he said earlier this year. Literally, a back and a neck. And it turned around and looked at me, and I was done.

That was Vanessa. So, two kiddies and 11 years later...' He makes it sound so simple, but in fact they didn't get together until 1998, four years after they first met. Their first child, Lily-Rose, came along quickly. Johnny described her as the greatest thing that's ever happened to me'.

Vanessa's spoken voice is singsong and sultry: half-French, half-American, wholly pop chanteuse. One of France's most enduringly popular performers, she achieved her first number one at the tender age of 14 with the international sensation Joe le Taxi' (which she sang while performing a precocious hip-swinging dance that she now can't bear to think about. I'm not so proud of it I look at the way I was dressed and made up and the way I would dance and I just want to say, "Eugh. Stop it!" '). Like all the best yé-yé girls, she worked with Serge Gainsbourg, then strayed towards rock, duetting with one-time boyfriend Lenny Kravitz, before returning to her roots – sweet, sexy acoustic pop. Her last three albums, Vanessa Paradis (1992), Bliss (2000) and Divinidylle (2007) all reached number one in France.

The video for her latest single, Il y a', is on her website, signed réalisé par JD' – that is, directed by Johnny Depp. It's a very homemade' film, she says, an old-fashioned stop-motion fantasy featuring, in her own words: Freedom, running, dancing, drinking, madness, the broadness of a bird's wings, nature, and people, and love, playfulness, day, night, stars, clouds, bells, no bells' Fearing she may go on for some time, I interrupt: was Johnny a good director Patient? Very patient and he's got beautiful ideas. My face is on camera, singing, and then he had the idea of transposing over it a film of clouds moving. In all things he has an incredible sense of detail, and you can sense this in the video.'

In one brief, flickering scene, the two of them appear in old-style wedding hats and coats, outside a church. After ten years together as common-law man and wife, telling anyone who asked that they didn't need a piece of paper' to make their relationship permanent, have they finally tied the knot? That's a metaphor? To tell you not to take things for granted. It's not pointing to weddings and bells.' But it must have been a little strange filming that scene? No, it was just fun, really funny.'

If he filmed her latest pop video, did she reciprocate by contributing anything to his latest movie, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland? No, nothing – except he stole my teeth!' She flashes her gap-toothed smile. He's trying to play The Mad Hatter, so why does he look just like me, with this weird face and big green eyes and a gap between his teeth?' Her gales of laughter subside. I'm joking. He doesn't need my help with his work. If he wants, sometimes I help him run through his lines, but I don't insist – "Eh, Johnny, time for your lines!" '

She loves acting (she won a Most Promising Actress César in 1990 for her performance in Noce Blanche), and has just completed a French romcom, L'Arnacoeur (Heartbreaker), filmed on location in Monaco and Paris. I have no idea how I came out –I haven't seen it yet, and the rhythm changes so much in the editing – but I know I was in the middle of genius actors, including Romain Duris and Julie Ferrier. They made me laugh so much.'

She is happy to leave the clowning to others. What's good is that I play the straight character in this. I love to laugh but I can't say I am good at making other people laugh.'

She is about to release her Best of album, and squeals self-consciously at how old this makes her sound. It's so weird to say those words! I guess it's OK. I have been around a long time – I've been doing this for 20 years. Over 20 years!' (She's now 36.) It's strange and surrealistic to do it but a greatest hits album is good either for people who have been loving you forever – or for people who don't know your stuff. It happens to me – you go into a record store and you're like, "I have to know this artist but which album shall I buy?" '

She's down-to-earth, all things considered. She even says, at one point, We have money now, but who knows how long it's going to last?' – as if she were subject to the same worries as the rest of the world. She's much more relaxed company than you would expect. She likes LA mainly because I know I can leave'. She enjoys its dazzling light – You're a London girl, you know how happy you are when the sun is shining' – and its interesting people. The ubiquity of plastic surgery doesn't bother her – nor, by the look of her natural, mobile face, does she take any part in it. I don't want to say what's right and wrong. If some people want to do it, that is their choice. But later in life you take charge of who you are and you discover that to be yourself is the real beauty, not to melt into the crowd.'

At 19, she became the face of Chanel No 5, appearing in an advert covered in feathers, tweeting and swinging on a trapeze in a gilded cage. Chanel's then creative advertising director, Jean-Paul Goude, said he dreamed up the concept because she reminded him of the cartoon character Tweety Pie. The coup de grâce was the shot of her splashing the perfume all over her feathers, basically taking a birdbath in Chanel No 5. Since then she has modelled its make-up and handbags, worn the brand to parties and has just been named the new face of Rouge Coco de Chanel lipsticks. Karl Lagerfeld is a friend.

What does she make of his recent, incendiary comments that women who objected to skinny models were Fat mummies sitting with their bags of chips in front of the television'? She hasn't heard of the row, but defends Lagerfeld instinctively. I love him and I think he's a genius. I don't agree with everything he says. Sometimes he can be pretty sarcastic, and he's too smart to mean what he said. He's the nicest man. When you work with him you see how he collaborates with his team of ladies who have worked with him on the collections for so many years. You see how respectful he is.' And he's not a body fascist? No. Isn't he the one who picks all the actresses and singers who aren't model size [including Lily Allen and Audrey Tautou] to do his campaigns? Like me – I'm not a regular model size.'

Her beauty does have a singularity. With a supple leg tucked beneath her and an elbow propped on her knee, her posture during the interview is boyish, gamine. She practises yoga and Pilates at home using videos. Occasionally she multitasks: jogging on the treadmill, in front of a good movie. Time, it's what gives me most trouble.

There's never enough time in a day.'With both their schedules so tight, how does she keep in touch with Johnny when they're apart? By Skype? We phone a lot. Skype is OK. I wouldn't want to do it every day. It's so hard to press stop. It's bad enough hanging up a phone but hanging up an image, I can't do that.' They really do seem to have one of the happiest partnerships in Hollywood. Cherie Blair once said the secret of her marriage was good old-fashioned distance: she hadn't ever let her husband see her shaving her legs. Vanessa would never be so prudish. I will tell you; Johnny has seen me shaving my legs! There's some stuff he hasn't seen, but this, I am fine to share. It's quite nice, actually.' hey come from markedly different cultures. He was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, to Betty Sue, a waitress, and John Depp, a civil engineer. His grandfather sold moonshine during Prohibition and his stepfather – his mother remarried when he was 15 – served a spell in Statesville Prison in Illinois. Vanessa was born in the Paris suburb of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, to a happily married interior designer, André, and housewife, Corinne.

Do their origins mean they are constantly learning from one another, discovering new differences? Yes. That's important, because if it's always the same, it's the beginning of the end, you know? It needs to evolve. We have an enrichissante, an enriching process, from a cultural point of view, in terms of taste and habits and words. I don't know what to call it, but it's great.'

Vanessa herself still feels distinctly European – she reads in French for pleasure, English for work – despite spending her life between their château in southwest France, their country home in Somerset, their house in Hollywood, and their private 45-acre island in the Caribbean, called Little Hall's Pond Cay, and accessed only by their steam-powered boat, the Vajoliroja. The name is a concatenation of the first two letters of each family member's name, but say it out loud and you'll hear the real name emerge – The Jolly Roger. Depp's move into the mainstream, with the phenomenally successful Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, clearly came just at the time when he had children of the right age to enjoy it.

They haven't decided where they will be spending Christmas yet, but wherever they go, it's unlikely Vanessa will slave over a hot stove. She looks puzzled when I ask if the cooking is her responsibility, saying guardedly, It's not only two hands that do it. Everybody helps.' There will be no church visit, but plenty of thankfulness for what they've got. I could say luxury is a Chanel dress, but in times like these, luxury is food on the table – and good food, also, not mush.' Yes, they spoil their children. But we also teach them how to give.

They get a lot but it doesn't pile up around them – they are really good also at donating. I can't talk about it, though. You give freely, from your heart, for no return.' Earlier this year they donated a sum reported to be £1 million to Great Ormond Street, the hospital that saved their daughter Lily-Rose when she suffered kidney failure after an E-coli infection. Johnny also thanked the hospital by spending four hours reading aloud to the children, dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow.

Vanessa doesn't know what she wants for Christmas, though she loves antiques, lace, velvet, old clothes'. But her ultimate luxury, she says, is freedom. Freedom to do what you want to do; say what you want to say.' And somewhere, either deep in the French countryside, or on one of the golden beaches on what they nickname f*** off island', the Depps will find a piece of this priceless freedom the rest of us take for granted.

In search of Vanessa Paradis

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