At the time of Claude Chabrol's 1994 drama about a jealous husband who suspects his ravishing young wife of having an affair, Chabrol said Emmanuelle Beart had "the face of an angel and the body of a whore". This comment has dogged her ever since and she sighs each time she hears it.

"In France, the public has this image of me as very sexual. I am always fighting against that. This is just one of the faces of me. I want to use all my powers, open all the windows, all the doors.

I have been using a lot of different faces, even using my body in different ways. If you sit like this," she says, hunching over, trying to look mousey, "or this," sitting up and thrusting out her chest, "it doesn't give the same impression. You have to be smart enough to get rid of the image, and the choices you make in my profession are very important."

Unfortunately, some of her choices have done more to reinforce the image than dispel it. She has a habit of using sexual imagery in interviews - she has likened film-making, for example, to coitus interruptus.

Most notoriously, some years back, she appeared on the cover of French Elle, walking out of the ocean and, inside, was shown romping in the shallows with a scantily clad youth. Men who had hitherto shown little interest in women's magazines rushed to buy these collectors' items and all 515,000 copies of the magazine sold within days.

She can explain those photos. "It was 5am. We had just arrived in Mauritius. I told the photographer I needed some time alone. I just wanted to swim. There was nobody about, so I took off my clothes and did not expect any photos."

Naturally, the photographer could not resist the sight of Venus emerging from the waves. Back in Paris, she was shown the pictures and asked if she liked them. "I don't like them, I love them," she replied and agreed to their publication for high-minded reasons.

"Magazines keep showing us very skinny models of 15 or 16. I am 38, a mother and a woman and I thought, `Why not?' For once, let's not have someone who is very skinny, very young. Let's make things move."

It's decades since Manon, but Beart, in a pink cardigan and jeans tucked into sheepskin boots, has lost none of her extraordinary allure: the Bardot pout, the tiny, curvaceous frame. It's hard to believe Beart’s actual age. Her heart-shaped face, big blue eyes, full lips and fine bone structure are still as breathtaking as they were when, at the age of 20, the whole world fell in love with her in Manon des sources.

Tiny though she is, her curves are generous and, had there been men to witness the flash of thigh peeping out between her long socks and silk skirt, there would be a stampede.

"Sometimes, I have the feeling," she says, with a charming pout, "that when you are 20 years old and people say, 'Oh, she's beautiful,' it sticks to you. Am I beautiful? It depends on the day, it depends on my life. Beauty is not something you can count on. Usually, when people say you are beautiful, it is when there is a harmony between the inside and the outside. When you are happy and in love and when you have children, then maybe you are beautiful."

Beart first registered in Claude Berri's Manon of the Spring (1986), a sun-drenched Marcel Pagnol story in which, with the cool grace of a Greek goddess, she played a shepherdess plotting revenge for her father's death.

In 1991, in Jacques Rivette's four-hour La Belle Noiseuse, she was a model for aging Picasso-like painter Michel Piccoli. Although she was often nude in the film, Beart insisted she was more interested in "baring my soul, not my ass."

She did both. Un Coeur en Hiver (1992) revealed her as the consummate guide to the small, daily emotional zigzags that mark modern Parisian (indeed, all) urban life.

About her entry into movies, she said:

"After I quit my studies, I was thinking to myself, What can I do? What kind of job is there where I could have money and a life that doesn't seem like all other lives? And I just said, "Actress. Why not?"

And being an actress meant moving to Paris. "If you could see the village where I was born, you would understand why. There's no way you could be an actress there, except in front of your mirror. "

"I've never met a person who hasn't seen Manon. And, so, one day I was famous - what you would call "the flavor of the month." It all came so fast when I was just begging for time to learn my job. Fortunately, I had this instinct to go back and act on the stage.

I usually play very active, passionate women and you probably have the impression that I like to talk a lot – because, in an interview, I have to say a lot of things. But in life, I prefer to watch. I miss that, actually, now that people are watching me.

Born in the South of France in 1965, Emmanuelle Beart grew up in Provence. She inherited her extraordinary eyes from her father, Guy Beart, the singer and poet, and her cheekbones from her mother, Genevieve Galea, a model. A wild child, she was expelled from five schools.

Why?

"I didn't understand what they wanted, why there were these codes of education and discipline at school," she says. "And when I think of myself then, I see it was a painful reaction to what I couldn't cope with. It came from suffering. I return to Hell, which is all about suffering, and examines the idea of fate."

"I was a terrible liar as a teenager. It was very trying for my parents, as I would never be the same girl from one hour to the next. I was always observing people, thinking, `How is she behaving? How is she writing? What is she saying?' "

Beart widens her enormous china-blue eyes, and gives a slight, Gallic shrug. "I played football when I was little. I didn't want to be an actress at all; I wanted to be a majorette in an Australian circus. That was my ambition. I started acting without any vocation. I continued out of love."

English she acquired as a 15-year-old au pair in Montreal. Her raw material was provided by her mother, Genevieve, a Greek/Italian model, and father, Guy, a Swiss/Russian heart-throb folk singer.

She was discovered by Vogue magazine and the director Robert Altman. After drama school in Paris came Manon des sources and, since then, the parts have poured in.

''When I chose this career, people said to me, 'Listen Emmanuelle, it's as if you've decided to play the lottery. There's very little chance you'll get anywhere and you're not even talented.' It was true - I wasn't even gifted. '

No one who saw Beart in Manon could accuse her of stumbling half-heartedly into her career. No sooner had she beguiled the film's grumpy peasant farmers with her funny little ways - and naked cavortings - than she was hailed as France's next great ingenue-superstar.

And yet, she only agreed to bathe naked in a spring for Manon des sources when the director agreed to do so, too. Her clothes have come off more readily in later films - indeed, they were scarcely ever on in La Belle noiseuse, for which she played an artist's model. In Nathalie, she played a whore - giving the profession its greatest image boost since Pretty Woman.

Her only major English-language role so far has been in Mission: Impossible, which caused reviewers to wonder whether she could actually act but, performing as well as she does in Nathalie and looking as lovely as she does, it is unlikely that the offers will dry up just yet. Beauty may have its downside, but it also has its uses.

Now ranked among the great women of French cinema, she's warmer than Catherine Deneuve, but without the sarcastic edge of Isabelle Huppert or the implosive fury of Isabelle Adjani. She is also known for preparing thoroughly for roles. Before Un coeur en hiver, she spent 18 months mastering the violin; for Nathalie, she took up dancing to tone her body, and prowled the bars of Paris for prostitutes on whom to model her character.

"I wanted to have little things to tell the tale, the way the women move, their relationship with men. They told me that during the day prostitutes didn't want anyone to be able to guess what they did at night. They have a double life - if they can have one.

Very often, there are no children, no man, so, really, their lives are very lonely. Some of them are incredibly beautiful. All of them are very smart, and they all want to stop, but they are waiting for someone or something."

Of course, famous French actresses have far more power than prostitutes. They can turn down parts. They can highlight their political and intellectual qualities by - as she did a few years ago - getting arrested for chaining herself to the railings of a Paris church in sympathy with immigrant workers.

They can show compassion in war zones and petition Jacques Chirac, as Béart did some time back, to ban headscarves and other religious symbols in schools. But, despite the power of their looks to attract attention, if an actress wants to work, she must take the roles offered to her.

She agrees: "Sometimes, I have said that I am like a whore. As actresses, we have to respond to the desire or fantasy of the director or the producer. Sometimes, you feel that, even if you are famous, you aren't giving your point of view: you have to include yourself in the way someone else wants to tell the story. So, when I'm really angry, I have said, 'OK, I've been paid, so take me. I'll be your whore.'"

Does she think her looks have stopped her getting the kind of gritty roles that actresses supposedly crave?

"Thank God, no, because there are French directors who have sought me out for parts like that of Odile in Les Egares. And my looks haven't prevented me from playing prostitutes or people broken by life. And when they need a token blonde with big breasts, that's OK, too. It's part of the game."

When it comes to Hollywood, it's Beart who has been doing all the spurning - or so she says. With a couple of exceptions, including the lacklustre Mission: Impossible, Beart has worked with European directors rather than Americans, a career path that means a far lower pay cheque.

"In Hollywood there's no real material. They would send me stuff, but I hadn't even seen the director. If I don't see the director's eyes, I'm not going. I'm not even going to pack my bags. To leave what? To leave my home, my kids, the people I love? I can't. Anyway, I don't give a damn about Hollywood."

Off screen, Béart is known for guarding her private life ferociously.

Her longest relationship has been with former husband and Manon co-star, Daniel Auteuil, after whom she moved on to David Moreau. She has two children - daughter Nelly, by Auteuil, and Johan, her son, by the composer David Moreau.

All she will say now about her arrangements for Nelly and Johan is that "fathers are as important as mothers", and since, she explains, her children's fathers live almost next door in Paris - both of them, she is free to travel as an actress and as an ambassador for Unicef.

As for marriage, even though 41 is now here, she is not interested. "I do not want stability," she says. "I have chosen an unstable profession and I like to keep moving into new worlds. We have an expression in France: "Love is the right person at the right moment."

Beart is confident that, as with Isabelle Huppert and Catherine Deneuve, her film career in France will continue well into middle age.

"There is a saying I love, which goes, 'At 20 you have the face your parents gave you, at 40 you have the face of your soul.' I find that very reassuring," she says.

"It would be too simple if pretty girls never got rejected," she admits, "There isn't a single woman who hasn't lived with that fear, that despair of losing someone, or this fierce desire because it's not reciprocated. The less reciprocation there is, the more desire we have."

How much of our lives, in her view, depend on fate and how much on free will?

"If you know the answer, please tell me, because I don't and it troubles me," Beart laughs.

She believes in what she calls her "lucky star". "I don't believe I'm here because I'm more talented, or because I'm prettier than others, but I think that something . . ."

She takes a deep breath and pauses.

"No, something which I feel very deeply, in almost an animal way, is that I have a sort of protection. It's very strange. But I'm not someone who sits back and relies on fate. I believe in hard work."

This article was based on the interviews with Susan Bell, Donald Lyons and Cassandra Jardine