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Juliette Binoche
Binoche savours sweet success
She has made her name playing a series of melancholy women but now French actress Juliette Binoche is enjoying the sweet taste of success with a lighter role.
"It's about chocolate, just how bad can that be," laughs the actress about her latest film Chocolat.
There is every reason for her to be in good humour as she has an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a single mother who reforms the uptight inhabitants of a small French town when she opens a chocolate shop full of delicious confections.
"This is a light piece, a happy piece. I'm in a good mood about this," Binoche says. "I liked the idea of using chocolate to link these people, but it took a lot of work to get this character right."
The 36-year-old already has an Oscar which she won in 1997 for playing grieving nurse Hana in The English Patient. At that stage the Paris-born actress had Hollywood at her feet but instead of taking the blockbuster route, she chose to stay close to her roots with small European films.
Chocolat is her first English-language film since The English Patient and she was determined to play the lead in the movie which is based on the best-seller by British writer Joanne Harris. She was chosen after Harris insisted that she was "earthy" enough for the part.
Best known for intense parts in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Damage, Chocolat shows Binoche enjoying some happier moments with Johnny Depp as a handsome wanderer who falls under her spell.
"This woman is lighter than some of the roles I've played and I think of her as a kind of therapist," says the actress. "That's why I liked playing her so much. She is warm and giving."
She also had to do some very enjoyable research for the film. "I went to see someone who does wonderful chocolates in Paris and he made me taste the different kinds, there's a lot of difference."
In the past Binoche has turned down major films such as Schindler's List and Jurassic Park - but insists she is glad she didn't go after the big pay and high-celebrity stakes of a Hollywood career, even after The English Patient.
"I simply went back to France and did four films and some theatre in London. That was fine with me and fitted perfectly with what I wanted to do at the time.
"My aim was never to be an American star, otherwise I would have moved to Los Angeles."
She enjoys her relatively low profile. "It's not as bad for me as it is for American stars. That's a completely different world, you become a kind of prisoner.
"I think as an actor you have to be more humble than that. When I won the Oscar there was something telling me 'this isn't the truth'. I had to get back to real work."
That included a 1998 production of Naked at London's Almeida Theatre for the Equity rate of £250 a week. Recently she did a Broadway production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal.
"I really don't think that the Oscar changed my career much because I didn't want it to," she insists. If she wins her second Academy Award, she is determined that, again, it won't make a difference.
Binoche is the only child of a theatre director and an actress who separated when she was four. She wanted to be an actress from a young age and dropped out of the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 18 and worked in a department store while trying to get acting work.
Just before she filmed Chocolat last year in England and France, Binoche gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Hannah. She won't discuss the father. Her seven-year-old son Raphael is from a previous relationship with professional diver Andre Halle.
Her next film project is much heavier in subject than Chocolat, a biopic of the great Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi, The Assumption of the Virgin.
She is pleased to be busy working even if it is demanding. "I like being a mother and I want to be involved in my work, so I have to make choices. If you're a film actress your career is from 20 to 45, but you can still dream.
"That's what is so surprising," she says, "I dreamed of things being like this when I was 18. So there's a kind of astonishment."
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