FOR once, the French do not have a word for it.

The closest might be chouette or super, but they would probably find cool more fitting. Whatever the quality, Jean Dujardin has it in abundance.

How else does one explain the behaviour of the French actor who, having made history by picking up one of five Oscars for The Artist, then promptly got on a plane home instead of sticking around and having his pick of parts? Dujardin demonstrated that one can take the actor out of France but … you know the rest.

Now, after an absence of three years, Dujardin is back in The Monuments Men, a picture which is packed with enough Hollywood heavyweights to fill several rows at the Oscars.

Written and directed by George Clooney, who also stars, the drama tells the true story of a band of art specialists given a mission by President Roosevelt to retrieve stolen art from the Nazis. With the likes of Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray and John Goodman holding up the American end, it is left to Dujardin and the Earl of Grantham (aka Hugh Bonneville from Downton Abbey) to fly the flags of France and Britain.

Another sign that Dujardin, 41, remains very much his own (French) man is that we are joined for our interview by an interpreter. I had imagined he would have been sent to intensive English lessons the minute after winning the Oscar, but when I ask if he has been learning English he jokes "just my lines".

"Unfortunately it's getting harder and harder with age," he says. "Italian and Spanish seem to stick with you but English, I'm trying, I'm not despairing yet. Maybe I'll be bilingual by the time I'm 70."

He first met Clooney when they were up for an Oscar in the same year (Clooney for The Descendants). Dujardin found his competitor an easy going sort, and that carried on to the set of The Monuments Men. "He puts people at ease. He saw that at the beginning I was rather shy because it's pretty impressive to have all these great American actors in front of you."

The international cast offered Dujardin the chance to shake things up in his acting. French acting tends to be more reserved, more inward-looking, he explains, while the American style is more playful. Dujardin took to it immediately. "I was always criticised in France for being too expressive, so it's very freeing, very liberating for me."

The Monuments Men also reunited Dujardin with John Goodman, who played the studio mogul to Dujardin's rising star in The Artist. Then, as now, the two hit it off, language barrier or not. "We work in similar ways. We don't need to say very much. When you look at John he's there, he's already in his character." Maybe it helps, Dujardin says, that their birthdays are within a day of each other.

Grant Heslov, Clooney's co-producer and writer, calls Dujardin "the French George Clooney", but a better fit, given the show he put on in The Artist, would be the French Gene Kelly.

The dance legend was one of the inspirations for the character of silent movie star George Valentin, as was Clark Gable, for the pencil moustache, and Jean-Paul Belmondo, a childhood favourite of Dujardin's, for his flair.

The 2011 comedy drama was a barrier-crossing hit, reckons Dujardin, because it was such an original idea, lovingly done. "It was also a very simple, straightforward story and that's what people like." The audience was given a chance to be swept up in the music, the romance and the comedy, and they took it. "There were nice ingredients like the little dog, and the love story," he adds.

Ah, le petit chien, Uggie, the biggest canine star since Lassie, winner of the Palm Dog award at Cannes, and a Jack Russell so choc-drop full of talent he wrote an autobiography. Mention of him brings a smile to Dujardin's face, but there's a shock to follow.

"I'm more of a cat person," he confesses. He loves the idea of a dog's endless loyalty, but he has never forgotten a certain path he had to walk in his childhood where he was chased by dogs nipping at his legs.

That said, the Parisian adored Uggie and the feeling was mutual, though meat had a lot to do with the latter. Uggie was so well trained there was barely a need to tell him anything, but Dujardin still had to keep sausages in his pocket to hold his attention sometimes. Then there was the pate that was smeared on the actor's neck so Uggie would lick him lovingly.

"For him I just represented this big mound of food," Dujardin laughs.

After returning to France, Dujardin resumed his old career in films and on television. Part of the reason why he was not as dazzled by the prospect of a Hollywood career as might have been expected was that he was already a star in France, largely courtesy of his spoof spy movies featuring the secret agent OSS117. The spy who was part Sean Connery and part inspector Clouseau was a Hazanavicius-Dujardin hit long before The Artist.

Dujardin turned to Connery's Bond for inspiration because he liked his style, that certain ocular twinkle. He has been told that Sir Sean's wife, Micheline Roquebrune, showed Connery the OSS117 films and the Scot laughed "a lot".

The Connerys and Clooney are not the only ones to appreciate Dujardin's talents. Martin Scorsese hired him to play a dodgy Swiss financier in The Wolf of Wall Street. "We called him God on the set," says Dujardin of Scorsese.

While everything ran like a Swiss watch, the director of Goodfellas and The Departed was also keen to let the actors try things out. "After ten minutes I felt no pressure. To such an extent he asked me to improvise a bit, in English and in French." Dujardin recalls his time on set as "pure pleasure".

With two such high profile, Hollywood movies as The Monuments Men and The Wolf of Wall Street, Dujardin might be said to be on the road he should have started on after The Artist. But the divorced father of two sons is so rooted in France that any estate agent expecting him to move to LA now is going to be disappointed. His life did not change after The Artist, he says, because he did not want it to. The fantasy of so many non-American actors, of making it big in the US, was not his.

"I feel profoundly French. It's important to me to shoot films in France, to play in my own language and defend the movie industry there."

Indeed, he reckons it is precisely because he has not chased fame in America that he is given the chance to do such interesting work there, then go home again. Travelling the world promoting a movie, as is required for big Hollywood films such as The Monuments Men, is all very pleasant he says.

"But what I really like, what I love, is my job."

The Monuments Men opens in cinemas tomorrow