YOU magazine

November 3, 2002

FANNY'S SPLENDID ISOLATION

French actress Fanny Ardant prefers men to women, but seeks solitude above all. So why did the former muse and lover of François Truffaut accept a leading role in the new French comedy 8 Femmes, starring alongside seven other actresses?

by Harry de Quetteville

You do not have to press Fanny Ardant to get her to reveal that she is a feminist-baiter. She likes to tell you. "I prefer men to women," she says, with the beginnings of a smile. "I remember I got the feminist lobby seething once, when I said that I'd rather have dinner with a stupid man than an intelligent woman." Her smile stretches to a wicked, toothy grin and she laughs, heartily. "The feminists didn't like that at all, for some reason. In fact, they kept going on about it."

Somehow, Fanny Ardant, dressed from head to foot in black, her eyes, heavy with mascara, hidden behind huge dark glasses and looking every inch the grande dame of French stage and screen, doesn't give the impression that the barbs of feminist criticism have drawn much blood from her. Instead, she looks composed and content to be, at 53, a powerful blend of sexiness and stateliness.

It's the hands that shatter that illusion. Her palms are large and raw, her nails unvarnished and bitten to the quick. She frequently stops talking to give a recalcitrant digit another gnaw, in a gesture that is unlikely rather than unbecoming in an actress who has, for several decades, been the epitome of a certain kind of French cinema.

In French cinema, Ardant's popularity and enduring appeal is equalled only by Catherine Deneuve, and her recent films, such as Ridicule and Le Colonel Chabert, are praised as much as her early work with François Truffaut, the director who became her lover. Indeed, 8 Femmes, which has packed French cinemas, is set to raise her profile even higher. The film, a quirky, kitsch musical whodunnit, stars the cream of French cinema. Eight women point the finger of accusation at each other when a man is murdered on the remote snowbound estate where they're spending Christmas. Catherine Deneuve plays the victim's wife, Gaby, while Fanny is his vampish, feisty sister, Pierrette.

While others, such as Emmanuelle Béart or Sophie Marceau, are associated with those French films in which pretty young women often have to wear nothing for long periods, Ardant is celebrated for wearing powdered wigs, beauty spots and corsets that emphasise her embonpoint. She is the beautiful bourgeoise, her well-bred looks lending themselves to the kind of glorious costume drama in which galloping hooves echo through the grounds of a deserted chateau, as the mists and the Revolutionary armies roll in.

She retains much of this bearing even without the corset. Standing absolutely straight, Mademoiselle Ardant, as - unmarried - she remains, is taller than any other women on the Paris restaurant terrace where we meet. It is a bearing that is often described as statuesque. In fact, she looks far less robust in the flesh than she does when she picks up her skirts and petticoats to run to her leading man on screen.

Nonetheless, the breeding is undoubtedly there. Her father was a cavalry officer in the French army. She was born in Saumur, the Loire chateau town that is also home to the famous cavalry school, before the family moved to Monaco.

"It's true that I came from a family of the old bourgeoisie, and from those traditions, but I had a different spirit. I was very influenced by my father. Outwardly, he would have been seen as the classic upper-class type, a cavalry officer. But, in fact, he was a dreamer. People always said that he must be very stiff, and I would reply, 'au contraire, to ride well you have to be very supple."

It was her father who infused Ardant with a love of literature and music, and who convinced her, when she was a headstrong teenager, to go to university before pursuing a career as an actress. "I never regretted it," she says, "but when I emerged at the other end, I still wanted to be an actress. Maman was horrified that I might be going to be a barmaid or a secretary when I couldn't get work."

Indeed, for long stretches of Ardant's twenties, her mother was proved right, and she had to endure a lot of unglamorous temporary work. "People would say, come on, be reasonable, at least you've had a go at it," she recalls, "but I was like a madwoman who was always pressing forward with one thing in mind. Life was simple then, with just one thing to aim for."

In retrospect, Fanny Ardant makes those first years sound like a halcyon period of uncomplicated passion. "It was totally without strategy," she notes. But - as with all good struggling actress stories - one day, the passion paid off. In 1979, when she was 30 - and ready for the scrap heap, by today's standards - she was recruited to appear in a French mini-series about the wives of the men in the trenches during the First World War.

"There are mysteries in life, and why I was hired for this series was one of those mysteries," she says. "But life changed overnight. It was the big break. Bang. I knew I had made it because people would stop me in the street and say: 'You can't treat your [on-screen] husband like that,' as if he were real'."

The consequences were immediate and long-lasting. The series brought her to the attention of the celebrated new-wave director, François Truffaut, who cast her in his next film, La Femme d'à côté (The Woman Next Door). It was a move that was to change her life professionally and personally. On screen, opposite Gérard Depardieu, she cemented her reputation as one of the new stars of French cinema. But it was with Truffaut that the sparks really flew.

Even now, Ardant can barely bring herself to talk about Truffaut, who died from a brain tumour in 1984, a year after Fanny had given birth to their daughter, Joséphine. (She has two other daughters, Lumir, now 26, and Baladine, 12.)

The story goes that after splitting with Catherine Deneuve, his other great muse, Truffaut plunged into a great depression, from which Ardant, unexpectedly, was able to rescue him. He used to say of her that: "She comes from a country that doesn't exist", and they stayed together for the last few years of his life.

"You know, I can talk about his endless perfectionism," Ardant says, after a long pause. "For him, it was a privilege to do his job. He hid his insecurities, his doubt. Even on the set of La Femme d'à côté, which is a tragic story, we laughed so much. It was a great role, a great film. It is a great memory for me." The death of the other great man in her life, her father, in 1976, gives an indication of her torment.

"When my father died, I was plunged into absolute despair," she says. "I became dark, and black. A Russian conductor I met once told me not to die out like a guttering flame. So, I try not to be too dark. But the world clouded over when he died. I wanted to bury myself. It was very violent. I had to fight not to give in."

Since the death of Truffaut, however, Fanny Ardant has never dismissed her reputation for darkness, though it is after her own peculiar, headstrong, eccentric fashion. "I'm not happy at all," she says, laughing hard.

But she is far from being the tearful type, who hides her pain behind a formidable exterior. Surprisingly, she is not melodramatic when she says: "I have no friends. I have no social life. I have never had actor friends - even now. There are people of whom I'm fond, of course. I've worked with Jeremy Irons several times, perhaps our paths will cross again. I am so close to Gerard Depardieu. Whenever we film together and the shooting ends, there is a moment of melancholy between us. But I put it aside."

Hers is a redoubtable and apparently willed solitude, which makes it odd that she agreed to play a "vulgar ex-cabaret dancer" in the ensemble murder mystery film 8 Femmes, which premiered at this summer's Edinburgh festival.

"I didn't really want to do the film at first, because I don't like working in groups - particularly groups of women, clucking about like hens," she says, once again displaying a talent for saying things that would get a man slapped.

Despite the forced proximity to the other actresses, Ardant remained in her own shell: "I stayed apart from the others. If there was a social life between them, I wasn't part of it."

If she sounds frosty or anti-social, or something of a prima donna, then she was perfectly cast in her next film. She plays Maria Callas in Franco Zeffirelli's long awaited Callas Forever, alongside Jeremy Irons and Joan Plowright, which will be released next year.

Much of the film was shot in Bucharest where, once again, Ardant refused to have much to do with the rest of the cast.

"Every night, for three months, after we had finished shooting, I would lock myself in my hotel bedroom and call room service. Every night, I ate the same thing. Then, one night, the others dragged me off to a restaurant for a bit of variety. But I had the same dish there. I think they thought I was mad as a hatter, but I just didn't care about the food. I cared about Callas."

Typically, playing the painful last months of the tortured opera singer were a delight for Ardant. "I could identify with those feelings - being all alone in your apartment when no one calls, with the feelings of solitude and despair that make you reflect on all that you have done in life and how it's all finished," she says, letting the impact of her words hit home.

Then, with a mischievous look, and perfect timing, the sombre actress says: "Yes, I was incredibly happy filming that."

(Article also published on Telegraph.co.uk - Alone with Truffaut's Dark Lady - August 14, 2002)

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