I never go against my nature
(Emmanuelle Touraine).

Strange and mysterious, she has the charm of the vamps, irresistible teasing. Facing her at the lounge of a parisian hotel we are unavoidably subdued by her feline beauty, her emerald glance and her cello voice, both pleasing and caressing with a delicious english accent. Majestic actress, she makes a brilliant return to cinema with Francois Ozon’s “Sous le sable”(under the sand).

There she is again in full light, she who stayed in the shadows over these past years by her own will. When we see her so perfect and omnipresent in this film, we almost get upset with producers for not being able to profit her talent. She frankly replies: “Some proposals have been offered to me, certainly not numerous, which I have refused. After some years I was in an enormous retirement. Cinema should be a shared desire.” She would never have thought of knocking at a producer’s door. She prefers to arise interest, loyal to certain principles. “Movies are a part of my life rather than a part of my career. I do choices depending on what I can accomplish at a certain moment”.

She has always undertaken the ways of freedom, far from frivolity, ready to take risks and fill all kinds of fantasies. Porter de Nuit, La Chair de l’orchidée, Max Mon Amour....these shocking films where she plays painful women, at the verge of breakdown. CR lives her roles to a point where the audience is easily identified with the characters depicted: “Acting is something very intimate-she states. It means to call the different persons coexisting in yourself. Marie, my character in Sous le Sable, is a part of my own experience, and a a part of her own adventure. I have reached this role in a very natural mood”.

She exposes a very seductive maturity in the flesh of Marie, a 50 year old woman who can’t stop mourning her husband, mysteriously vanished.

“Francois Ozon wanted a woman brave enough to show herself as she is:half naked, sometimes sad, without makeup, exhausted. This is, a pretty lady half aged, at the same time not absolutely beautiful”.CR has nothing to hide at 53 years old, “I have never gone against my nature, opposite to what I am. I cannot lie”.

A doubtless loyalty due to her very strict education, marked by her father’s authority, colonel at Her Gracious Majesty’s Army. While Marie remains in evasion, Charlotte succeeds in solving her mourning thanks to psycho analysis- the death of her sister and mother, her separation from Jean Michel Jarre, her husband since 1978, and the overcoming of a depression that affected her for a long time.

“Forsake, divorce and death are the hardest events human beings can live. I have always suffered enormously with separations. But if we can’t accept to live with our dead and our sorrow, we can run the risk of easily becoming mad. Life sometimes is not enough to help us. I agree very much with the idea of talking to a third person, ready to travel with you through your life. With depression we resemble the dead. It takes away every craving.”

Eagerness is back for everything, she points out. Charming rebel, stranger at the Hexagone, she will continue to be an actress without borders. She loves the formule: “Be there where one should, urgently, like those marvelous physicians. To learn what you ought to learn. To be useful”. Enigmatic, she plans, amongst other projects, a role at Michel Blanc’s forthcoming film. She smiles: life is back in her again.


“I like the idea of my career being rewarded, all the little goals in life I have shown. It is a recognition from my country of adoption, even when I have done few french films”