Isabelle Huppert: tears and a temper

In a crowded field, Isabelle Huppert emerges as France's trickiest actress: mercurial, talented and 'as scary as Madonna'. Hermione Eyre experiences an invigorating blast of Gallic froideur...

Isabelle Huppert has made unforgettable films: she has been seduced by Gérard Depardieu in Maurice Pialat's Loulou, played Madame Bovary for Claude Chabrol, and chilled with her career-defining performance as a repressed, self-mutilating musician in Michael Haneke's 2001 film The Piano Teacher. From her breakthrough role in La Dentellière (The Lacemaker) in 1977, which won her a BAFTA for best newcomer, it was clear she was a huge talent. But she has kept herself too glacially aloof in interviews and played too many damaged, sinister characters too convincingly to evince a warm, fan-clubby feeling from her public. A prominent English male playwright described her to me as the scariest actress he'd ever met, 'apart from Madonna'.

This morning she is resting her power to terrify. Wan-faced, she accepts a cup of tea – black, no sugar – and collects a plate of food from the buffet as if ravenous, then leaves it barely eaten. She seems small, shy, cringing; it's as if she hasn't put her public face on yet. Can she make herself anonymous while she's out and about in Paris? 'In a railway station, or in the street sometimes, I see people looking at me curiously,' she says in a low, thoughtful voice. 'Then I think they decide, no, it's my cousin.' And can she become 'Isabelle Huppert' at will? 'Sometimes I decide to be myself and nobody recognises me! It really depends on where you are. If you go to certain places in Paris, people will recognise you, if you go to a little corner shop maybe not. Maybe being a TV actor, you get a warm response from the public. But movies create distance.'

That said, sitting close beside her on a sofa, I can't help noticing her perfume – a fug of Chanel – and surprisingly for a famously intellectual actress, she responds enthusiastically. 'Today it's Chanel No 22' (a vintage blend created in 1922) 'but I'm very unfaithful, you know, when it comes to perfume. My regular is L'Heure Bleu, by Guerlain, but I also love Fracas, which is a bit stronger, so it's better for the evening. I like perfumes, I like smelling them on other people. I can never smell it on myself so I put more and more on I'm happy when people tell me they can smell it on me.'

She loves London, praising The Ivy and the parks in springtime. I'm beginning to think she's rather warm and approachable, until she suddenly gives me a blast of froideur, dismissing an innocuous question (what she likes to eat at The Ivy) with a wave of the hand and a face like a bad smell.

She has three children, Lolita, 26, Lorenzo, 24, and Angelo, 13, with Ronald Chammah, a Lebanese-Italian film-maker whom she met in 1982 and who directed her in a movie, Milan Noir, in 1987. Lolita is an actress who has appeared in four films with her, most recently the French mother-daughter comedy Copacabana. Lorenzo is studying English in London 'at private school'.

She credits her mother, an English teacher, for kickstarting an Anglophile tendency that she has never lost, despite an ill-fated visit in 1996 when she played Mary Queen of Scots in Adrian Schiller's play Mary Stuart at the National Theatre. The critics were rude about her heavy French accent and, at a lunch party, Princess Diana told her she didn't want to see the play because, she said, 'I will finish like Mary Queen of Scots and be chopped', a remark that led Huppert's name to be mentioned at the Diana inquest.

She has made 96 films and counting. The latest, White Material, directed by a grande dame of French arthouse cinema, Claire Denis, is a tour de force. It is set on a coffee plantation in an unspecified former French colony in central West Africa, and she plays a landowner determined to keep her farm running despite local violence, extortion and hostility. She is like a post-colonial Mother Courage or a demented Conrad hero in a frilly white frock: as a white landowner she is not wanted, and yet she will not leave. She has never looked so emaciated on screen, nor so strong. Did she lose weight for the part? 'No, this is how I am.' She would rather speak in similes: 'In the film I am like an insect. Or a virus which desperately wants to stay in this environment.' When I spoke to Denis, she was the same: 'Isabelle, she's like a twig,' she told me. 'A twig made of iron.'

Filming in Cameroon was 'a shock, mentally and physically and intellectually a shock,' says Huppert. 'The people are great, and the landscape is beautiful but what you see is difficult.' Such as? 'Poverty.' How long did it take her to become acclimatised? 'I don't think you ever do.' The anti-malarial drugs made her feel 'slightly depressed', but her son Angelo was a cheering presence, going to school locally. He had a cameo role in the film which was later cut. 'So disappointing for him!'

Huppert and Denis developed a strong working relationship. 'I don't know how, but she can immediately read my mind,' says Denis, describing
a scene in which, riding a motorbike, Isabelle undoes her ponytail. 'She doesn't say, "Shall I release my hair?" It just happens; I don't need to ask. I love her spirit. She makes you feel anything is possible. She has the intelligence never to ask psychological questions on set, never "What is my motivation?", only precise questions.' Huppert simply says: 'She's a master, especially at capturing the texture of time on film I love the way she films my hair. All of a sudden it looks like a tree.' It's true: in the film her light red hair does resemble some kind of African weed, all flyaway frizz. It's not
a look many actresses would aspire to, but Huppert is beyond vanity.