She’s comfortable in her own skin

Paris

It doesn’t look like a star’s apartment, no trophies to her glory, no vanity photos or posters. Emmanuelle Beart lives in an aerie above Luxembourg Garden, with books and giant oil paintings that take center stage, and the sound of children -- her son and daughter -- in the wings. As for the actress, she sits straight, the honey hair in a knot, brow furrowed over sapphire eyes, a slight woman serving tea. Far from the wild child running naked she played in Claude Berri’s “Manon of the Spring.” “Ah,” she says, “I had just turned 18 -- that was 20 years ago.”

Beart has spent much time naked on screen, famously, superbly naked. “It was never a problem,” she says, “The body is an actor’s tool, like the face, malleable. I never thought that being naked was immoral or outrageous.”

Others may find the sexy pout too much, the derriere too provocative: When she enters a room, women tend to rush their men out of the line of fire. She has been showcased as the nymphette-temptress many times and displayed a range of talents in films by Claude Chabrol, Regis Wargnier, Olivier Assayas, Francois Ozon. She has also done Ibsen on stage.

Recently, she played a prostitute in Anne Fontaine’s “Nathalie,” opposite Fanny Ardant. “It’s a film about desire,” she says. “The crude language bothered me more than the nudity.” Her role in Jacques Rivette’s 1991 film “The Beautiful Nuisance” (La Belle Noiseuse), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, has gone down in history. Playing an artist’s model opposite Michel Piccoli, the actress lounged naked for almost four hours, baring every voluptuous curve. “The body, in ‘La Belle Noiseuse,’ was the source of the artist’s creativity,” she says.

Rivette, the late Claude Sautet and Andre Techine are the founding fathers of her career. “These men were my tutors; they make up my backbone. They have a moral center. Once you have worked with them, you can do anything.”

In Sautet’s “A Heart in Winter,” she studied violin for her part, and that violin occupies a chair in the room where we sit.

The first time she worked with Techine, she played a prostitute in the 1991 “I Don’t Kiss.” In “Strayed,” his new film, which has just opened in Los Angeles, she plays a young widowed mother, escaping Paris during the 1941 exodus with her son and small daughter.

“Andre hates historic reconstruction,” she says. “So he took a small story about a family of four, with the war raging outside. There are different wars -- and there’s the war inside us -- this war gave people the terrible feeling of not being able to count on anything familiar, not even their old selves.”

In the film, Beart and her family take refuge in an abandoned house. A vagrant adolescent (Gaspard Ulliel) creeps into their home, hunting and robbing cadavers to feed them, shocking the mother. “She is what I call a professional adult, with a strong sense of duty -- her way of facing terrible realities.” Conflict and erotic attraction flare between the mother and the wild boy. “Perhaps, paradoxically, this woman never felt so alive before.”

An interest in the world

Like Juliette Binoche and Sandrine Bonnaire, Beart is a thoroughly modern woman, feet on the ground, well rooted. She did not spring from the bourgeoisie; she is mostly self-taught and is known to speak her mind in a voice that is melodic but can rise. She takes sides: As a UNICEF ambassador for the past two years, she has traveled in the Balkans, the Orient, South America and Africa. “Once I opened my eyes to the realities of life, I couldn’t close them.”

With her brother, photographer Olivier Guespin, she co-wrote a book on her journeys. She also made a film on child prostitution in Thailand. “I’m not a doctor, sociologist or ethnologist -- I had to find a way to be useful.” She is on the jury of this year’s Cannes film festival. “I’m honored, and I’m not going to pretend to be a cinephile or anything; I’m going to react to the films with my heart.”

As we talk, her daughter Nelly, 11, enters the room. “She is the child I had with Daniel [Auteuil, the actor]. We lived together 11 years.” They whisper to each other, a litany of little things that ends with “Je t’aime, maman,” “Je t’aime aussi.”

Beart, born in Saint Tropez, grew up in the nearby hamlet of Cogolin, and while she didn’t run naked in the fields like Manon, she was often left to her own devices. “We were raised without movies, theater or music. We had only nature, the hills, the trees. When I got on the set of ‘Manon,’ I wasn’t star-struck because I didn’t know what a star was.” She played opposite Auteuil, “who was discovered overnight,” and Yves Montand, who confided stories of his conquests -- “what a devil!”

Her father, singer-poet Guy Beart, separated from her mother when Emmanuelle was 9 months old. Eventually as the eldest of her mother’s five children, she was often in charge of the little ones. “The maternal instinct goes way back with me. When you’ve held a baby in your arms at age 8, that sense of responsibility never leaves you in peace, it sticks to you like a tattoo.

“I would love to feel irresponsible. It must be great.”

When she was 15, she took off for Montreal. “I had been kicked out of every school, and I was lucky to land up in a family that adopted me. It was an important break. It saved me.” She talks about her father -- they are critical of each other but friends -- and especially about her maternal grandmother, “the woman of my life.”

“My grandmother, who lives here with me, is 100 years old -- a marvel -- she is Greek, Italian, Maltese. I fell in love with her when I was 3 years old, and I made her a promise: ‘When you are old, I will take care of you -- your life will be beautiful.’ ” While working on “Strayed,” Beart talked with her grandmother about her past: how she had left Belgium with her two small children in the back of the car, for Portugal. “She was a living witness to that exodus.”

Beart is grateful that Techine chose her for the part. “Andre follows what I do. He could picture me in another role, even though I had played a prostitute before, and that’s rare in France. In America, actors get a chance to play against their image: Look at Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Sharon Stone, Charlize Theron -- they weren’t kept in a cage.”

Unfortunately, since 1996’s “Mission: Impossible,” she herself seems to have been put in a cage: She has only been offered “pale imitations” of the leading role she played in that film. “It’s not that I need America, but I would like a bigger opening, I would like somebody to say, ‘I have something for you.’ My desire comes from the desire of others. When Andre chose me for ‘Strayed,’ he said, ‘I want a woman who doesn’t know what seduction is, who just lives for her family, her work.’ ”

She feels that she has become that woman. “I found out that work is a passion, and I tell my children that.” Today, she awaits something new, the play, the part, the person. “I’m not in a hurry. I have been chosen before. I chose too ... you have to choose. I shudder when I think of the nerve I had. But you have to renounce some things and open up to others.”