I am not super-attached to my career," Audrey Tautou says. "I have several plan Bs: I want to become a sailor; I like to draw; I would love to learn many things, but I don't have time..."
She trails off, leaving an uncertain silence hanging over the hotel room where we've met to discuss her latest film, a delightful comic confection called Beautiful Lies. "That is the problem, you know," she continues. "That is the reason why I will quit acting very soon."
Until I met her, I had always placed Tautou, now 32 but with the slender frame and flawless complexion of a girl half her age, among that rare group of French film actresses — the likes of Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, and most recently Marion Cotillard — with the talent, ambition and, well, je ne sais quoi to earn them a lasting place in the international consciousness.
These are women who steal the hearts of even those people who have little interest in either France or film and seem destined to be admired, observed and idolised throughout their lives.
Tautou printed her own invitation to that club 10 years ago when, with a performance of irresistible charm, she helped Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie become the most successful French film of all time, taking more than £105 million (Dh632.04 million) around the world.
Five years later, she would play to an even wider audience, opposite Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code, Ron Howard's mega-budget adaptation of Dan Brown's international bestseller.
She has appeared in only three features since, all French.
Exposure
Tautou says she can still recall the peculiar feeling of being part of The Da Vinci Code's "big, big machine". She'll never forget her first taste of the kind of giddy power that only a starring role in a Hollywood blockbuster can lend an actress; nor how queasy it made her feel. "I didn't want to have this power," she says, with a shrug. "I would rather have freedom; and to find that you have to stop being in big, exposed movies. I don't surf on the big waves. When I see them coming, I take my board and go straight back to the beach."
Suddenly it is clear. To listen to Tautou talk about her career, in a turbulent mixture of French and English, is to hear an actress whose attitude towards her own fame and success is increasingly ambivalent.
In fact, if she belongs alongside another French actress, perhaps it is Brigitte Bardot (although physically they could hardly be more incongruous). At the height of her fame and with audiences still going gaga for her, Bardot dramatically severed her ties to cinema, never to return to the screen — a coup that Tautou appears increasingly ready to emulate.
Following The Da Vinci Code, Tautou says she took the decision "to calm everything down", turning her back on the kind of international fame that most actresses would kill for. Why? "Because it didn't suit me," she says.
"It is not the way I want to live my life. I confess, my father doesn't understand. If I tell him I'm not planning to take a job for a year, he frowns, he worries. I understand that nobody understands me, but I can't be someone I'm not."
That may sound like a riddle of the kind that Eric Cantona would once have relished, but her gist is transparent enough: if you want to see Tautou on screen again, you shouldn't hang about.
Love letters
Beautiful Lies is a light-hearted, well-crafted comedy of errors: a souffle, really, but one concocted from the most delicious ingredients. In an attempt to cheer up her depressive mother (Nathalie Baye) — and to get her off her back — Tautou's character, a hairdresser, sends her anonymous love letters, an act of deceit that sets off a whole chain of unfortunate events.
The film was made by Pierre Salvadori, director of Tautou's 2006 comedy Priceless and a man who understands that, with her gift for physical expression and a pin-sharp sense of timing, Tautou is tailor-made for comedy.
She may have the captivating features of a model (and indeed, continues to appear on billboards and in magazines as the face of Chanel No 5) but she has the heart of a clown.
She took the role in Beautiful Lies partly out of a desire to work again with Salvadori and admiration for the script, but also because she couldn't bring herself to pass up the chance to star in a comedy at a time when "it is very rare for an actress to be the comic lead".
"When you look at the comedies that are out there, 99 per cent of the time, men are the heroes. It's often thought that a woman can't be funny, that women are supposed to be sexy, not funny.
"And yet, to play the clown is such a pleasure."
Tautou grew up in the rural Auvergne region of France. She got her first proper taste of acting as a teenager when her father and mother (a dental surgeon and a teacher) treated her to a summer course at the renowned Parisian theatre school Cours Florent.
"It was to reward me for my good results at baccalaureat," she says, "and I liked it. But at first I was much more fascinated by painting and drawing than by performance.
"However, that is something I never could have expressed to my parents, because they thought of my studies in practical terms. They worried about which courses would most likely lead to employment. And art school is really not well, you know."
She ended up studying literature at the Sorbonne, "so I had a safety net", while continuing to take acting lessons on the side. After graduating she gave herself a year to make it as an actress, and not a day more.
"I thought, ‘I don't want to keep doing this job if this job doesn't want me.' I didn't want to spend all my life waiting for the phone to ring and living in a 10 square metre apartment. No, no, no. There are too many wonderful things to do in life. So I gave myself a year — and that was the year I got cast in Venus Beauty."
Casting surprise
Her debut performance in Tonie Marshall's gentle comedy as a young beautician who falls in love with a burn-scarred pilot three times her age won Tautou a Cesar award. It also caught the attention of Jeunet, who was seeking someone to play Amelie after the actress for whom he had written the role, Britain's Emily Watson, became unavailable.
Tautou says she was staggered to be offered the part, but then adds that she was no less shocked to get a message recently from Michel Gondry, director of the Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, asking her to star in his next, French-language film. "I am always surprised to be chosen by a director for a role because I never understand why they like me," she says.
Surely, I suggest, that is false modesty, coming from one of Europe's most bankable stars. "Oh no, really, I am serious," she says. "I am always surprised to be cast."
Does her track record — in Jeunet's hits; or in Stephen Frears' acclaimed Dirty Pretty Things, or as a compellingly self-possessed Coco Chanel in Anne Fontaine's 2009 biopic — not give her at least a little confidence? "No," she says with a scowl, "pas du tout."
"A few months ago, I watched one of my old movies and I thought to myself, ‘Oh, Jesus!' Thank God that at the point I made that film I didn't realise the extent to which I was terrible. Oh, mon dieu! Mon dieu!"
But surely, I say, she can take from that the reassurance that she has only improved as an actress. "Or," she says, jabbing a finger in the air, "I say to myself, does it simply mean that if in another 10 years I rewatch the films I am making today I will say, ‘Oh mon dieu, how terrible I was then?'"
She laughs that odd, breathy laugh again and then looks me dead in the eye. "You have to be very careful in this life."
