Film: Enduringly alluring

Nathalie Baye's kooky beauty and earthy intelligence made her a staple of French cinema. At 50, her charms have hardly faded.

GOODNESS, BUT Nathalie Baye is game. Not in a blustery, English, Jeremy Beadle way, but her dark eyes shine with professional persistence, a kind of concentrated determination to complete any task set her. She's here to publicise Tonie Marshall's Venus Beauty, and the usual interview situation, pockmarked with awkward pauses, crumbles in the face of her vitality, her refusal to collude with the passivity that is the interviewee's normal perspective. She wants to know everything, from the price of a London cinema ticket to the whereabouts of Richard E Grant, her co-star in Poliakoff's Food of Love, an English-language film yet to be released here.

Maybe that gameness, together with the slightly kooky beauty, was what led Francois Truffaut to cast her as Joelle, the script-girl in Day For Night, his serenade to the cinema. At 25, Joelle - who would "give up a man for a film, but would never give up a film for a man" - was the former dancer's first screen role. Baye obviously done good, because Truffaut cast her twice more (in The Man Who Loved Women and The Green Room).

By the time Truffaut died, Baye had become one of four actresses (with Miou-Miou and Isabelles Huppert and Adjani) to define French cinema in the Seventies - an era of playfully, eccentrically charming films like Blier's Les Valseuses and Godard's Slow Motion. Baye fitted in perfectly.

She starred with Huppert in the latter film, worked with Bertrand Tavernier on A Week's Holiday and gained Cesar awards and plaudits for her role in Bob Swaim's La Balance. Her career foundered slightly in the Eighties, partly as a result of her long relationship with Johnny Halliday, France's answer to Sinatra, and the daughter she had with him in the mid-Eighties.

"Tavernier and I wanted to make another film together, a kind of Western, beautiful script, but I was pregnant and I thought a Western, horses, no good for a baby."

Acting is something Baye's used to giving her all to. She hates what she calls "un numero": set pieces, acting on autopilot. "I often find a big difference between the work of English and of American actors. English actors have a truthfulness, an intensity, you don't feel the performance, while with American actors you often see the performance, the numero. That annoys me."

Actors, she states, never do a numero with Godard. Even for the king of French cinema (according to the intelligentsia anyway) it is remarkable to consistently coax good performances out of bad actors. "He is someone with whom it is not possible to try to fabricate things," explains Baye. "He steals things from you, but at the same time he gives you so much. Even Brigitte Bardot, who was never much as an actress, in Le Mepris she's charming. He takes actors for themselves and prevents them from using any little tricks to get themselves out of difficulties. He taught me openness.

"Once I was making a film with him with an actor who is very well-known in France, he has made a lot of very average films, where when you don't know what to do next you light a cigarette, or something like that. And Godard said to him: `Stop - you have made too many bad films and it has taught you bad habits.' He's violent like that, but it forces you not to do un numero."

Truffaut, Godard, Tavernier - it's not a bad pedigree, but there are gaps she is determined to fill. Baye starts filming with Claude Chabrol in July, followed by a film with Xavier Beauvois. There is something very French - in the most positive sense - in her ability to bounce between different generations of film-makers playing romantic leads at 50. Her accommodating charm and granite common sense, as well as her talent, make her age irrelevant. For her, evidently, it's simply un numero.

`Venus Beauty' is currently on release