"He looked like the Italian actor Gino Venturi. . . how rare to find a writer so good-looking."

His face made her want to film The Smell of Blood. "I wanted to play the character Sylvia, a wife abandoned for a younger woman by the husband she deeply loves, " she says. "It's unusual to find a part for a mature woman that isn't a cliché, but this was a strange yet true character. She can't face the idea of love ebbing away. She goes into an affair with a young fascist, knowing she is going to be humiliated. Sometimes death is better than resignation."

Ardant found out that Italian director Mario Martone had already written a screenplay based on The Smell of Blood.

Stranger still, he'd imagined her in the role. Although initially unable to get funding, her determination got it made.

It opened the Director's Fortnight at Cannes in 2004 to critical acclaim.

Unlike Isabelle Huppert or Sophie Marceau, Ardant has shunned Hollywood, although she impressed in Swann in Love. While an icon in France, abroad she's a secret pleasure. "Cinema is not only a business, it is a question of passion.

From the moment I started to become an actress, I have always followed my passion. I never choose a role for money or glory. I choose it because I know that during the filming, it will be my passion and I will be happy."

That's what attracted her to Francois Truffaut when he cast her in the title role of The Woman Next Door and also in his last movie, Finally Sunday. "He had an endless passion for cinema, " she says.

They lived together for several years.

Two weeks before the birth of their daughter Josephine in September 1983, Truffaut suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. It seemed at first an operation had been successful. Ardant returned to the stage in Miss Julie. She filmed Love Unto Deathwith Alain Resnais. Perhaps sensing the truth - he died soon after - Truffaut encouraged her to rebuild her career without him. "The good thing in life is that when you are given a gift, the gift opens you up, " she says. "I saw my life with Francois as a gift. It would have been a pity to have wasted it."

What she hadn't realised when she spotted The Smell of Bloodwas that Parise had done the Italian translation of Truffaut's Jules and Jim. "Sometimes life has a bigger imagination even than we have, " she says.

By another chance she recently starred opposite Gerard Depardieu as the betrayed wife in Anne Fontaine's Nathalie, having first appeared with him in The Woman Next Door. Paris Match recently published a spread of the two together, suggesting they were a couple.

"Oh no, no, no, " she laughs. "Journalists are such romantics."

For all her beauty no-one is more convincing than Ardant at embodying the sense of a woman alone. "Freedom is what I admire most, " she says. "I have nothing. I have no country house. I have no car. But I am free and it's my choice.

It means I can say no. I don't have to accept a movie to pay bills." She lives in an apartment overlooking the Trocadero in Paris. "I don't want to be as society expects a lady of my age to behave. One day I may want to be wise, another day sexy. I need that freedom."

Her parents had been against her becoming an actress. "They thought it was a caprice. So I placated them by first studying politics. It was like my passport to freedom."

She has brought up her children - she has two other daughters -"to despise money and be independent, " she says. "I said you have to choose a job that you love above anything else. If you have a passion for what you are doing, you will never feel alone or lost. In my life I think what has saved me is my acting."