Virginie Ledoyen: ten years after starring in The Beach

Virginie Ledoyen is on time. She glides into La Rotonde, a café in Montparnasse not far from her home, on a rainy morning, looking like a little sunbeam in an electric-blue leather jacket. She sits on a red velvet chair, politely asks for a pot of tea and opens her handbag to take out her BlackBerry. I spot a pack of Marlboro Reds, and I think of the YouTube posting of Ledoyen sitting in a Parisian café, smoking, eating something delicious and laughing out loud: 'J'adore ça!' It made me like her before I met her: someone who still drinks and smokes and eats and looks like they enjoy it.

But she is clearly proud of her daughter: she pulls out the BlackBerry again and shows a black and white photograph of mother and daughter, equally stunning, leaning against an old stone wall in Paris. In the photo, Ledoyen is wearing Chanel, which is the perfect Parisian trick: to look great in jeans and in couture.

When I mention how surprised I was to have seen Ledoyen pregnant, in a white dress at the Cannes Film Festival eight years ago, at the premiere of The Beach, her breakout film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, she laughs. 'Most actresses who just got discovered by Hollywood might have waited a little bit before having a baby,' I venture. She smiles broadly. 'Yes, I became a mother young. I was 24. But maybe because my mother had me young, I always wanted to have a baby. It was just obvious to me. And I wanted that baby so much, it was not even an issue.'

French critics sometimes liken her to Isabelle Huppert, and see her as an actress who will be capable, as she gets older, of deep, intense characterisation. Ledoyen is flattered by that reference; she grew up watching Huppert, and 'actors like Marcello Mastroianni. Rather than taking lessons, I learned by watching.' Her models were Anna Karina, Gena Rowlands, Katharine Hepburn.

Ledoyen - born Virginie Fernandez; her paternal grandfather was Spanish - is the child of a 'modest' family who lived in the Paris suburbs. Her father sold cleaning products on a market stall, her mother worked in a restaurant, and she has a younger brother who works in film production. But working-class French families still go on skiing holidays and her childhood was not deprived. She once said, 'We did not live on bread and butter.'

By the time she made Don Juan, she was beginning to get the acting bug. 'It's funny; I just did it like a hobby. Then I reached adolescence and people started asking: "What do you want to do with your life?" I thought maybe I wanted to be a lawyer. But I knew I could not do both. Both require a certain discipline. So I became an actress.'

At 16, she left home. She says she is someone who needs time alone. At 18, she made the Olivier Assayas film L'eau Froide, playing a troubled teenager. The film had a profound effect on her career: she was inspired by Assayas, with whom she went on to work again in Touts les Garçons et les Filles de Leur Age. Her first English language film was A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries with Merchant-Ivory, before Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting and now Slumdog Millionaire, put out a call for a French actress.

That was for The Beach, one of the most hyped films of the time, based on the Alex Garland novel. Ledoyen was 22 when filming started in Thailand for four months 'under the sun on Phuket and Phi Phi Island'. The film was logistically tricky to make: ecologists were furious; fans of the book said Boyle did not stick to the plot. But it was fun to watch, there were great locations, and Virginie looked fantastic in a bikini.

Ten years on, she has nothing but praise for DiCaprio ('a real cinephile, a very talented actor'), with whom she had a solidly professional relationship. 'He is what I would call a great actor,' she says. 'Intense, emotional, intelligent.' She is grateful for the experience of working with Boyle, and points out that while the film was promoted as a Hollywood movie, it was really a British one. 'Danny is British and the crew was British. And Danny is great. He's a smart man, but he is more than that,' she says. 'He has an interesting universe around him.'