"Like Wine, She Gets Better With..."

Very French, very grown-up When Fanny Ardant was young, she was told she was 'like wine, you'll get better with . . .' Her new film confirms that prediction. She flirts lightly with Jasper Rees.
 

by Jasper Rees

There's a game played by film buffs called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It is based on the theory that you require only half a dozen films to get from any actor in the history of cinema back to Bacon. In French cinema the game would be simpler, and shorter, because everyone who is anyone has been with everyone else. Perhaps you could call it Trois Degres de Fanny Ardant.

An apogee was reached in 2002 in the otherwise rather flimsy 8 Women, a camp musical whodunit that featured more or less every French female pin-up of the past 40 years, among them Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant passionately kissing. One can only imagine what the great director François Truffaut would have thought as the muses of his middle and late periods indulged in a little light lesbo chic.

There is a scene in Nathalie, an impeccably cast chamber piece heaving with lots of (rather sad) sex directed by the former actress Anne Fontaine, when Ardant is very nearly at it again. Her husband (Gerard Depardieu) is routinely unfaithful. She hires a prostitute (Emmanuelle Béart) to seduce him and find out what he's not getting at home. Naturally prostitute and wife form a vicarious intimacy of their own, so that in one scene it looks likely they will succumb to each other. "The relationship is a bit like one you get in a Turkish bath," explains Ardant. "It's not sexual. It's sensual. It doesn't need to be consummated. There is a phrase of Marguerite Duras that I love and say all the time: `Attendre l'amour, c'est deja de l'amour.' " Waiting for love is love itself.

Nathalie is one of those beguiling films that come along about once a year to reconfirm France as the country where film is made by grown-ups for grown-ups. Hence the truism universally acknowledged that age shall not wither a French film actress's career the way it does an American's. "I always hear the lamentation of American actresses: `There are no roles for mature women,' " says Ardant. "It's not a remark that interests me. French cinema is built around women so you don't always think in terms of age. My character could be played by someone much younger or much older."

Ardant is 55, and looking splendid on it. She strides into a cafe just over the river from the Eiffel Tower wearing a pink coat and huge wasp-eye sunglasses. She is tall, and her short black hair is far wilder than you ever see it on film. But then she is best known to British audiences as bewigged countesses and queens in Swann in Love, Ridicule and Elizabeth, which was her first significant English-language role (there have been many more in Italian, and she recently made her debut in Spanish).

Ardant has one of those French smiles that seems to go on forever and a mighty laugh. This is a surprise because she has a reputation for aloofness, or at least separateness, partly based on nugatory eccentricities such as always ordering the same meal from room service when on location. She made a film called La Cena in Rome, but every night for her la cena (Italian for dinner) was "fusilli con pomodoro e basilico, insalata mista e un yoghurt. It was a very beautiful hotel and the head chef wanted to know, `Who is this madwoman who for three months orders the same thing every night?' "

Her name seems too good to be true for a French screen siren, but is actually her own. The daughter of a cavalry officer whom Prince Rainier appointed military governor of Monaco, she fell in love with the theatre as a teenager - she talks with an appreciative thrill about the "lying" and "manipulation" in Marivaux and Laclos.

Rather than tumble straight onto the boards, she was persuaded by her parents to attend university first - she read politics at Aix, which is how she ended up in London in 1973, finishing a degree while working at the French embassy. Until she was fired, that is.

"They said, `Listen, miss, either you get here on time or you leave.' " She left. She served coffee at the BBC, worked at a Scandinavian travel agent and shared a flat with "the most beautiful woman in London" who, she notes approvingly, had "all the men at Annabel's at her feet". She talks about this flatmate with the same detached aestheticism as she talks about the luminous Beart. "I look at beautiful women the way I look at a tree."

As for herself, she never believed she was beautiful. "I was ugly. I couldn't do cinema. I did theatre. It was a huge shock to see myself on screen. Really. People told me."

Who? Directors?

"Yes. Or the directors' assistants. Which is worse." She roars with laughter. "I remember a man at a party. I was 20, he was 50. I was sitting down and not dancing because I didn't wanted to dance. And he said to me, `Don't worry. You are like wine. You'll get better with . . .' " She bursts out laughing again before she can finish. "And it was true. He was right."

She may not have been then but she is now a consummate flirt. "I love the pleasure of conversation. It's like a game of cat and mouse. You know Montaigne? He said there are three great things in life: reading, introspection and conversation. I know that an interview is not a real conversation because everything I say will be written down. But I treat it as a real conversation."

She always wanted to act, and even though she never discusses her films with her three daughters (just as she didn't with her parents), she would encourage them to "go for it" if they wanted to act.

"It's the most beautiful life. But you must not deceive yourself with your reasons for wanting to do it. It's not a question of money or celebrity: that's a false reason. But if you love it in an absolute way, even when you're doing a play in a village at the far end of Normandy . . . I've thought that if I'd killed someone, I would have done theatre in prison."

She was a late starter in film. Truffaut spotted her in a television series and cast her as Depardieu's new neighbour and former lover in The Woman Next Door. She was 30. The director and his discovery fell in love. He spent his final four years with her. Her middle daughter, now 20, is his. But in the filmgoer's mind Ardant is perhaps even more associated with Depardieu. After The Woman Next Door (1981) came Le Colonel Chabert in 1994, based on the story by Balzac. Then five years ago there was a television drama in which Depardieu played Balzac himself to Ardant's Eve Hanska, the Polish woman the novelist corresponded with for years and eventually married.

"I find that in life there are people you feel comfortable with immediately. It's a question almost of smell. You like them a lot but you can't say why. With Gerard it's perhaps because I started with him. When my husband in The Woman Next Door introduced me to him, the way he said bonjour, the way he looked at me, both as actor and character, he made me forget the camera. It's always the same relationship, the same conversation. He's never played my brother or my enemy. So it's the same person, the same feelings, the same way of looking or taking the hand, because you don't change."

It's a sort of professional marriage, or would be if Ardant were not fabulously austere about mixing with fellow actors. She says she once accepted a dinner invitation from Deneuve. But she never picks up the phone. "Between The Woman Next Door and Le Colonel Chabert was 10 years. I don't have a social life, so I never met Gerard. It's not like we say, `Ah let's have dinner.' Would you understand if I say I don't like to mouiller la poudre?" She likes to keep her powder dry. "Friendship makes things banal. I find that when you work with an actor you need something electric. When the director says, `Do you want to meet the actor before working with them?' I say no. But when they say to me, `In the script that'll be Gerard . . .' " She raises both her arms in triumph.

Ardant's favourite performance of recent years has, sadly, not been seen in this country. She first played Maria Callas on stage in 1997 in a French translation of Terence McNally's Masterclass, directed by Roman Polanski. Then in 2002 came the title role in Franco Zeffirelli's English-language film, Callas Forever which finds the diva languishing in a Paris apartment in her final months. "It is one of those roles which has left a mark in my life. To be abandoned, to find yourself alone in a salon because no one calls any more - she was a character I could understand."