Charlotte Gainsbourg's speaking voice is one of the strangest around: reedy and fluting in a way that can only be described as Mitford-esque. Her sentences are measured and precise, as if she's always thinking about punctuation. Even though she grew up in Paris, and still lives there, she doesn't seem to have a trace of a French accent. You could easily be fooled into thinking that here was an impressively bilingual individual, a perfect exemplar of Eurotunnel culture. But Gainsbourg isn't having it. "Always when I'm speaking English, it's like I'm pretending to be fluent. I don't feel fluent at all." This comes out in textbook-perfect English, of course.
It's a pertinent point because in her latest film Gainsbourg is, once again, playing an Englishwoman. In past years she's played Jane Eyre - a perfectly appropriate use of her spectrally weird voice and otherworldly screen presence - and the incestuous sister Julie in an adaptation of Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden. In Nuovomondo (aka The Golden Door), she's back doing the Jane Eyre thing, playing a turn-of-the-century Englishwoman with a secret sorrow, taking passage on a ship filled with Italian peasants.
Does playing English bring out her English side, I ask. "I'm French," she says. "I'm much more comfortable speaking French. It's easier to express myself in French. I'm not looking for words; it's much more natural."
Gainsbourg is, of course, possibly the most famous half-French, half-English person in the world. Born in London, she is the only offspring of professional provocateur Serge Gainsbourg and socialite-cum-actress Jane Birkin. Still only 35, she has been a bona fide film star in France for more than 20 years, made a couple of pretty decent records, been shot by legions of fashion photographers, and had two children. More significantly, perhaps, she was the subject of sustained, and very public, adulation from her father (who died in 1991) during early adolescence, culminating in their 1986 duet on a song called Lemon Incest. It appeared on an album he wrote for her entitled (with characteristic reticence) Charlotte for Ever. (The video, in which she and her father snuggle up on a king-size bed with black satin sheets, is an object lesson in edge-of-legality queasiness.) Gainsbourg pere also wrote and directed a film called Charlotte for Ever at the same time; 15-year-old Charlotte was required to do a nude scene.
These days, in spite of it all, Gainsbourg looks surprisingly normal. In blue jeans and combat jacket, she smokes her way through one cigarette after another, even though she claims she's giving up. She's also very careful with her words: as much, perhaps, because of her nervousness with the language as to do with her complicated upbringing. At first, she says, she made all her films in her school holidays. Then came art college. She dropped out quickly to start an acting career in earnest. "It was only then I thought: right, I'm going to be an actress." Largely due to her father's tireless idolatry, she made her mark quickly (she played the lead in L'Effrontee, her first significant film, aged 13) but found it more difficult to turn acting into a career. "I was always doing something," she says, "but it was much slower than I expected. Nothing was really happening. I was never a workaholic; I was doing one film a year, quite slow. Then with My Wife Is an Actress, I stepped out of something. I don't know how to explain it. It happened with that film."
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