Agent of a taboo era

I feel like an old man,'' says Sophie Marceau, flashing the kind of disarming smile that makes old men feel young again, “or like an ancient turtle that has been in this world for 300 years.''

It certainly feels as if an age has passed since Marceau, the daughter of a truck driver and a shopkeeper, first stormed French cinemas as the pretty, pouting, 13-year-old star of Pinoteau's 1980 teen hit La Boum (The Party).

In the years since, she has appeared in more than 30 films — from blockbusters such as Braveheart and Bond to the kind of art-house curios that few people see — and even directed a couple of her own features.

Yet the dark-haired French woman sitting in front of me, her legs tucked childishly beneath her on the sofa, looks like someone barely touched by life, and far younger than her 41 years.

When she talks, she moves — puffing her fringe off her high forehead in faux exasperation, or clapping her hands to punctuate a joke. “I'm not a theoretical person,'' she says.

“I like to touch things, to experience things with my body. That is why I act, because it's physical; it's like having a fever. It can really plunge you into terrible things.''

For her latest role, in Female Agents, Marceau is plunged into things rather more terrible than most: as the leader of a gang of female spies sent into occupied France during the Second World War, she is shot at, imprisoned, betrayed, tortured and her husband is killed.

Inspired by the true story of the women employed by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to serve undercover during the war, Jean-Paul Salome's gripping film suggests you don't have to be male to be a hero and that, used cunningly, lingerie and lipstick can be as deadly as any weapon.

Haunting question

Refreshingly, the film allows most of its beautiful stars to stand alone as strong, independent women, resisting the temptation to pair them off with dashing beaux.

“Well, there is not much time for romance when you are fighting to survive,'' Marceau says, “although love can help with that too, by the way.''

Essentially a rollicking adventure, Female Agents nevertheless prods at an uncomfortable question that continues to haunt the French more than 60 years after the war ended: who resisted and who collaborated?

“It still hasn't been spoken about properly in France,'' Marceau says.

“If people — or their families — collaborated, they don't tell you, they keep silent. And I think that has nourished a kind of complex. The French are weird sometimes: they can be a real pain.''

In Female Agents, for the first time in her career, the former child star was the most senior actress on set. “I felt like the boss,'' she says, “and I loved it.''

Her youngest costar — the formidable 21-year-old Deborah François — wasn't even born when the teenage Sophie Maupu landed the lead role in La Boum and renamed herself after the Parisian avenue she drove down on her way to sign the contract.

“I think unconsciously I was a very determined child,'' she says, “but if you had asked me what I was determined about, I wouldn't have known. I didn't really know what I was looking for. When you start working that young, a lot of stuff happens that can be really damaging.

"You become a famous person, a public person, when really you are still just a child that is not finished yet. You can be reshaped before you have even worked out who you are.''

At 18, in what looked like a bid for shelter and stability, she embarked on a relationship with Andrzej Zulawski, a Polish auteur 24 years her senior, and withdrew to his house in the Polish countryside.

“That [relationship] was one of the main choices of my life,'' Marceau says. “It was not as entertaining as being a teenager and having friends and all that stuff but I thought I had to protect myself so I isolated myself a bit.''

Their pairing — which Marceau now recognises as being “a little bit Pygmalion'' — provoked a stir, not least when he cast her in a film as a teenage prostitute.

But they remained together for 17 years and, in 1995, Marceau gave birth to their son.

Seven years later she had a daughter, to Jim Lemley (an American who helped produce Marceau's Anna Karenina) and she has now settled with Christopher Lambert, the Highlander star, whom she directed in her last film.

Within France

Her career to date has been a little hit-and-miss but the fact that she has scarcely been seen on screens outside France in recent years seems not to bother her.

“I'm terrible with my career,'' she admits. “It's my own fault: I hardly ever call my agent. But then I've already achieved more than I ever thought I would.''

There is an appealing ease about Marceau's manner, a lack of the kind of neurosis that drives so many actors.

“I feel more comfortable being myself in this world than I used to,'' she says. “It's good to get older: everything gets easier.''

The French director Salome was inspired to make Female Agents after reading an obituary of Lise Villemeur, the second woman to be parachuted into occupied France by Britain's SOE.

After landing in the Loire valley on the night of September 24, 1942, Villemeur assumed a false identity (“Odile'') and installed herself in a flat in Poitiers, from which she ran a safe house for agents.

She later told of the precariousness of this time, how every minute was spent “trying not to do the wrong thing''. She became adept at talking her way out of sticky situations.

One day she returned to her room to find a German soldier sitting on her parachute-silk sleeping bag.

On another occasion, she cycled back all the way from Paris to Normandy, during which she had to sleep in roadside ditches.

In 1945, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, head of the SOE's French section, described her as “a very courageous, very diplomatic woman [who] played a large role in the liberation''.

“Oh no,'' she would say when asked about her heroism, “I am just an ordinary person.'' She died on March 28, 2004 aged 98.

Female Agents was released in Britain on June 27.