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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday January 16 2000 11.01 GMT
Catherine Denueve calls her 'the best'. She looks like a young Isabella Adjani and soon she'll be the envy of teenyboppers worldwide. Why? Because she's Leonardo DiCaprio's amorous backpacking pal in The Beach, the new film from the makers of Trainspotting.
Virginie Ledoyen has got it made, it seems. Ever since the announcement was made last year that she would be the beautiful French traveller in the screen adaptation of Alex Garland's novel (Virginie Who? - we gasped), her career trajectory skied overnight.
It's not that things were going badly beforehand thank-you-very-much, but when director Danny Boyle cast her in The Beach, her future co-star, post-Titanic, just happened to be the hottest star in the world. The $40 million movie is about an American drifter in Thailand who enters a utopian commune on a remote island; Ledoyen is a fellow member and his enigmatic object of desire.
Inevitably, given the nature of her luminous role in The Beach, comparisons with legendary French screen sirens have been made and rebutted. Is she a glacial Denueve type, or perhaps the film sees her clad in bikini and wrap - the rebirth of Bardot? Probably neither, especially since Bardot said more with her hips than she ever did with her lips. In her own country, Ledoyen is viewed as an accomplished actress with a string of Cesar nominations (the French equivalent of the Oscars) to her name.
She follows the recent line of elegant femmes such as Sophie Marceau and Juliette Binoche, who have shone intermittently in English language films. Tellingly, the actress that Ledoyen she would most like to emulate is Jeanne Moreau.
The Beach is her second English-speaking part, her first occurred in Merchant-Ivory's overlooked A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries . Previously she had starred in French films including La Ceremonie and last year's Late August, Early September.
A child model turned actress, she made her debut in the comedy Les Exploits d'un Jeune Don Juan in 1987 and shortly afterwards appeared on the cover of French Premiere magazine. During her teens she attended the prestigious drama school L'Ecole des Enfants du Spectacle in Paris, but reckons she was always too shy to take part in the school plays. Bashful, yet still precocious enough to leave her parents' home at 16 and rent an apartment on the other side of Paris.
'People say I'm very tough, but I'm not sure I am,' she told the New York Times. I do like to play girls who are independent, who have a lot of character and a story to tell. They aren't just there to be pretty.'
It does help, though, as moviegoers are about to find out. She's also just been signed up as the new face of L'Oreal following Claudia Schiffer and Milla Jovovich. She's currently filming a lavish French TV adaptation of Les Miserables, co-starring John Malkovich, Gerard Depardieu and Moreau. Perhaps the grand dame of French cinema will pass on a few tips to the newest pretender?
