On anyone but Juliette Binoche, a grey cableknit jumper tied bulkily about the neck, its woollen sleeves dangling like shrunken arms from the throat, would look absurd. But this is the best-known actress in France; a woman who looked Hollywood in the eye, shrugged and said no; a woman who, when she accepted her Best Actress Award for Copie Conforme at the Cannes festival on Sunday, accessorised her strapless white Celine gown with a large sign bearing the name Jafar Panahi, an Iranian director imprisoned for "making the wrong kind of films” and released on bail yesterday, thanks to her campaign.
"As an actress I think there is always a political consciousness there,” she muses, when I ask about the tears she shed on the red carpet, "and doing a film with Abbas Kiarostami [the Iranian film director who wrote Copie Conforme] is already political, so I don’t need to add more. Your consciousness should be in the choice of the work.”
Despite Hollywood’s lengthy courtship (the 46-year-old famously refused parts in Steven Spielberg’sJurassic Park and opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible), and the luminous beauty that prompted the childhood nickname La Brioche (as a schoolgirl, the Paris-born daughter of a theatre director and actress was said to be as delectable as freshly baked bread), Binoche’s choice of work has remained resolutely unfrivolous. She has worked with the most acclaimed directors in the world over the course of her career (Jean-Luc Godard, who wrote Je Vous Salue Marie with her in mind, Krzysztof Kieslowski on Three Colours Blue, and Lasse Hallström on Chocolat), won an Oscar for her role in Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, but, aside from a five-year contract with Lancôme – has tended to shirk celebrity. "I have always been cautious of that world,” she says, sitting on a shaded day-bed of her Cannes hotel, an American twang lilting her French accent. "I avoided going to too many parties, and have, from the start, wanted to protect my kids from all that. My private life is very private and I have chosen not to live in America or England, where you are so exposed and can’t fight against it.” "In Paris, there are privacy laws preventing you from being photographed in the street.” When I ask whether that was the reason that she never returned the attentions of Hollywood, unlike fellow actresses Emmanuelle Béart or Sophie Marceau, she scoffs in a rather graceful, Gallic way. "Non, non: that wouldn’t have been a strong enough reason. And besides, that would mean that they had won.” It wasn’t the stereotyped "seductive French female roles” that put her off either, she assures me. "We have our role in the movie business and I think that it’s OK for French women to be initiators and goddesses of love, but I always like something challenging.”