“It starts as a black comedy and ends in absolute nightmare, all in very few scenes, a beautifully constructed film about an intrusion into an ordered world in which the anxiety is so heightened that you don’t know where the real ends and the imaginary begins. “People say to me, ‘You came alive again when Fran?s Ozon came into your life.’ Not at all! He helped me because I opened the doors and he saw that I was already on my way there,” she says.Her first new film, Lemming, opened Cannes last year and arrives here on 28 April. It’s a psychothriller with supernatural undertones, about the destructive friendship between two married couples. These she links instead to the long-ago death of her elder sister. Rampling had always claimed her sister’s death was due to a brain haemorrhage; only recently did she reveal that it was, in fact, suicide.After Under the Sand, Ozon created another terrific role for her in Swimming Pool, as Sarah (named in memory of Rampling’s sister), a desiccated murder-mystery writer who discovers her inner vamp during a holiday in the South of France. It was, she feels, a result, rather than the cause of her recurring bouts of depression.
That union, which lasted more than 20 years, ended in 1997 when Jarre had an affair. Before that, there were two marriages, to her then-agent, Bryan Southcombe, with whom she had a son, Barnaby, in 1973, and to the musician Jean Michel Jarre; their son, David, is 29. Crisp and commanding when she speaks English, her low voice becomes seductive when she slides into fluent French.Rampling’s present partner is Jean-Noel Tassez, a business consultant a decade her junior. She wears black cigarette pants and a crisp white shirt: classic French chic quickened with the shock multicoloured splash of a tailored floral jacket “I thought I’d put on some flowers for you,” she says “As a rule, I’m always in black.” She seems in good spirits. Virtually alone on screen for much of the film, gliding from the easy intimacy of a long and comfortable marriage, to obsessive grief and, eventually, a desperate eroticism with a replacement lover, Rampling was a revelation. Under the Sand was a huge success in France and ever since film-makers have been queuing up to work with her.
“I don’t seek directors out; they seek me out,” she says now.When we meet in Paris, where she has been based for nearly 30 years (though she maintains a pied-?erre in Chelsea), Rampling is looking good – very good, in fact, with those splendid cheekbones and smoky bedroom eyes. Then in 2000 Ozon cast her in Under the Sand, the eerie story of a woman unable to accept her husband’s sudden mysterious disappearance. And she is also in Basic Instinct 2.
Yet, only a few years ago, she looked in a bad way. Mired in depression, she was scrabbling for dowager roles: the dotty spinster Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, the scheming Aunt Maude in The Wings of the Dove. This year so far, apart from celebrating the big birthday (on 5 February), she has led the jury at the Berlin Film Festival, is currently shooting a movie in Britain with Fran?s Ozon and will be seen here shortly in work by two more of France’s most highly regarded directors.