Elegant, beautiful and mysterious, Audrey Tautou makes a perfect Coco Chanel. So why won�t she play the Hollywood game?

AUDREY Tautou has a little ritual she likes to perform every time she gives an interview, and today is no different. Batting her eyelids, she asks if I would mind if she took my photo. I agree, of course. Out pops her little black Leica camera (no flashy digital device here) and - click - I'm recorded for posterity.

This is not the first time I've been snapped by Tautou. When I met the actress in Paris five years ago to talk about Jean-Pierre Jeunet's war epic A Very Long Engagement, she did the same. In fact, she began the tradition in 2001, shortly after she was shot to international fame by her first collaboration with Jeunet, Amélie. But what does she do with this rogues' gallery of mugshots? Does she stick them in an album? She shakes her head. Does she flick through them, reminiscing about all those chats over the years? She is aghast. "Oh, no. What do you think? It's just a memory." The pictures, and the taking of them, are a way to counterbalance the "lost hours" spent giving interviews. And, being Audrey Tautou, she's given a lot of those. "The problem is that people know I do that now, so they ask me for something in exchange," she says. "So I think this might be the last time."

Even so, Tautou is a very willing interviewee. Sitting in the Soho Hotel in London, switching between French and broken English in the sweetest of Gallic accents, she never gives the impression that she resents giving up her time. She clearly recognises promotion as an important - if slightly tedious - part of her job.

When she made her breakthrough in Amélie, her life changed irreparably in ways that would have unhinged many less-balanced actors. Playing a kooky Parisian waitress who just wants to spread a little happiness, Tautou melted the hearts of the French film-going public, becoming the most adored actress since Brigitte Bardot steamed up screens. "Because the film was such a success and because so many people have seen it, I am identified with Amélie," she once told me. Which may go some way to explaining why, eight years after that film, she has taken on the role of the untouchable fashion designer Coco Chanel in the French-language movie Coco Before Chanel. As a means of shaking off her ingenue image, playing a 20th-century icon feels like a bold but bright move.

So far, the film has taken more than 5million in France, a respectable return in a country that banned the film's poster shot of Tautou holding a cigarette for contravening its new anti-smoking laws. Still, it hardly matters. While the former Chanel model Anna Mouglalis also plays the designer in the rival film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which closed the Cannes Film Festival in May, Tautou can truly lay claim to the role. She recently replaced Nicole Kidman as the "face" of Chanel No. 5, the company's signature fragrance, and starred in a short promotional film called Train de Nuit, which reunited her with Jeunet.

Stressing it was a "coincidence" that she got the Chanel No. 5 gig while making the new movie, Tautou nevertheless believes she was "predestined" to play Coco Chanel. As she perches delicately on a sofa, it's not hard to see what the 32-year-old actress means. Even if her features are infinitely more delicate than Chanel's, she has the same wave of dark hair, unfathomable brown eyes and inquisitive arch to the brow. More importantly, both women boast the same indefatigable spirit. As Coco Before Chanel's director Anne Fontaine says of the actress: "She looks fragile but she's not. She's very determined."

Tautou believes she shares other traits with the designer, too. "Like her, I have to keep my independence in terms of my career," she says. "I have a big need for freedom." Then there's a sense of pride, although she thinks it was more powerful in the designer's case. "What made her exceptional was that she was the woman of the moment. She was very intelligent, strong and courageous. She refused to let herself be closed off by social conventions and she was almost a rebel, a feminist ahead of her time."

Much of this is merely hinted at in Coco Before Chanel, which takes us from the designer's childhood, spent in an orphanage run by strict Catholic nuns in the late nineteenth century, to a time when her clothes were about to take Paris by storm. In between, the film charts the two most significant relationships of Chanel's life: with the easy-going aristocrat Etienne Balsan (played by Benoît Poelvoorde) and the English tycoon Arthur "Boy" Capel (Alessandro Nivola). Balsan gave Chanel access to the French upper classes, whose fashions she would change from the frills of the Belle Epoque era to something more streamlined and stylish, but it was Capel for whom she fell head over heels.

"I think the meeting with Capel was one of the turning points in her life," says Tautou. "He was the first person who saw her not as some servant woman or as an eccentric distraction. He saw her as a special woman, in a good way." The actress admits, however, that playing Chanel at this embryonic stage was not easy. "The most difficult thing for me was to play her before she starts to be more confident. At the beginning of the story, I had to try and give her nature, her strength, her pride, her authority, her hardness, but with a mix of doubt and motivation in her personality. That was difficult as it was the unknown."

Tautou subtly unearths an undercurrent of vulnerability in Chanel that sits at odds with the designer's reputation. "Behind the facade that looks so strong, there was something buried in her. To be so strong, you have to be hiding something as big as your strength. The desire to keep her intimacy and her suffering to herself is what I think makes this character so powerful and mysterious."

For our interview, Tautou has chosen to wear a knitted cream jumper and jeans tightened with a leather belt almost as wide as her minuscule waist: a casual look that is a perfect example of what she means when she says we're all descendants of Chanel's style. "She freed women from the corset," she says. "She was her own laboratory. She really used clothes to express her desire for independence and freedom: her style is really the expression of the modern woman." For her own part, Tautou does not obsessively hunt out the latest fashions in the boutiques of Paris, where she lives. "I'm not really bothered by it. I like clothes. But I don't go shopping very often."

TAUTOU arrived in Paris from the provincial town of Montluçon when she was 17. The daughter of a dental surgeon (her father) and a teacher (her mother), she played the oboe as a child in a youth orchestra and dreamed of studying primates for a living. Acting came only when her parents offered her a two-week summer course at the prestigious Cours Florent theatre school as a reward for getting good grades in her baccalaureate exams. When she arrived in Paris, she was dumbstruck by the legions of beautiful women on the streets near her apartment - only to realise later that she lived just round the corner from the Elite modelling agency.

She was offered, and accepted, a full-time place at Cours Florent, but also studied literature at the Sorbonne university. She admits her parents were a little uncertain when she told them she wanted to forge a career in theatre and film. "They were not really happy about that. But they were reassured because I was a good student. They knew if it didn't work and I failed as an actress, I would resume my studies if I needed to." Even then, superstition prevented her from admitting her desire to act. "I wouldn't say it to anyone - not even to myself," she remembers. "I'd just let things happen. I'd rather do things than talk about them."

After winning an acting competition run by the production company Canal+ in 1998, she began to land movie roles - initially in The Libertine, "a dreadful, vulgar film" that she did because she needed the money. More fortuitous was the part of a rather gauche beautician in Venus Beauty - although it was a poster, rather than the film itself, that caught the eye of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who was looking for a replacement for the lead in Amélie after the English actress Emily Watson had dropped out. The director has said he was struck by the "flash of innocence" he saw. By the time Amélie was released, Paris was awash with pictures of Tautou's elfin face.

She was, she says, somewhat shocked by the attention. It meant giving up "little freedoms" - such as riding the metro "without having people staring at you like you are the star animal at the zoo". Nevertheless, fame has had its plus points. Invited to meet President Chirac at the Elysée Palace, Tautou was subsequently sent abroad as a French ambassador for culture. Yet she also kept her head down, acting in small-scale projects rather than capitalising on the instant fame bestowed upon her.

It is not hard to sense how difficult the actress found the trappings of celebrity. Even now, she refuses to discuss her private life - so much so that, when I tell her I heard that her sister worked as a seamstress in the costume department on Coco Before Chanel, she refuses even to tell me her name. "The problem is, I'd prefer to ask her first," she stammers, "and I don't want to involve her if she doesn't agree."

She makes no apologies for this guarded behaviour. "I'm a very secret person. I am not willing to devote or to show everything. Especially with intimacy - I am very jealous about guarding that. I keep it to myself." Predictably, when asked whether she is still dating the French singer Matthieu Chédid or is now with the American photographer Lance Mazmanian, she won't say.

"When you make yourself more discreet, and don't expose yourself as much in the media, you can lead your life quietly," she says. "I wouldn't like being exposed to celebrity all the time throughout the year."

Though she made her English-language debut in Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things a year after Amélie, in 2002, Tautou has been reluctant to pursue an international career. "It's tough for French actresses to make it in Hollywood," she once said. "I wouldn't mind being in an American film for a laugh, but I certainly don't want to be in Thingy Blah Blah 3, if you know what I mean." She changed her tune, of course, after scoring the part of cryptologist Sophie Neveu opposite Tom Hanks in the 2006 blockbuster adaptation of Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code. Despite its awful reviews, she escaped with her reputation relatively unscathed. Since then, she has remained in France, playing a Riviera gold-digger in Priceless (2006) and a lonely cleaning lady in Hunting And Gathering (2007). She shrugs when I ask if she wants to return to Hollywood: "It depends on the project. I cannot control what people want, if they want me to be in a film or not." A look of defiance crosses her face. "I don't particularly want them to ask me, either."

Success in Europe, she says, does not automatically open doors in America. "A project from Hollywood doesn't come from the sky. I got The Da Vinci Code because there was an audition. If you want to get a project in Hollywood, you have to work for it and I'm not ambitious enough to do the work, to be there, to be present. If it happens for a project that interests me, I would be very happy. But I don't see myself working to exist in this amazing Hollywood world."

It's a viewpoint that does her credit, and one more reason why the French will forever love Audrey Tautou. Chanel would be proud.

Coco Before Chanel opens on July 31. .