Please file an anti-trust suit against Emmanuelle Beart, the 22-year-old French ingenue, star of ”Date With an Angel” and ”Manon of the Spring”
(the ”Jean de Florette” sequel that opens next month). She`s lovely. And smart. And witty. And talented. Clearly this is a monopoly.
No one has a right to look this radiant having just deplaned a red-eye from Paris. ”Date With an Angel,” in which Beart plays the title role (wings and all) and does for hero Michael Knight what Daryl Hannah did for Tom Hanks in ”Splash,” is obviously typecasting. Beart also plays against type, however. In ”Manon” she has the title role, a feral, fatherless wild child and goat girl of the Midi in a performance that earned her a Cesar-the French Oscar-last year.
She is not tall and blonde and drop-dead beautiful. Rather Beart is fawnlike and sunny and looks different from every angle-the face of a star. Her slanty blue eyes and ironic mouth suggest Brigitte Bardot. Yet Beart`s heart-shaped face has something of Audrey Hepburn to it-brains and bones.
”Audrey Hepburn?” she asks, protruding her lower lip. ”They usually tell me Faye Dunaway and Catherine Deneuve. I take Hepburn as a compliment.”
Beart also takes it as a compliment that Orion Classics, American distributor of ”Manon,” has sent a roll of posters for the film to her suite at the Ritz-Carlton.
As she unfurls them, a 150-watt smile brightens the already luminous face: The poster features Beart crouching among her flock, clad in Manon`s sackcloth. Her co-star Yves Montand is not pictured. ”Oh-la-la, Yves will be furious!” Beart exclaims with a golden giggle. ”You see, in France it`s Montand huge on the posters and you need a microscope to find my name even,” she explains.
She speaks slangy, if not 100 percent grammatical, English-with just a soupcon of a French lilt. The St. Tropez native, daughter of French pop singer Guy Beart and model Genevieve, lived in Montreal for three years as an au pair for an English-speaking family. ”I was supposed to learn French to the children but instead they learn me English.”
It wasn`t learning another language that got Beart interested in Montreal; rather, it was her restlessness with provincial France. ”When I was 16 I got fed up with the South. I had almost never been to Paris. I saw an announcement in a newspaper placed by English-speaking Canadians for a French- speaking jeune fille.”
Once in Montreal, Beart attended a French-speaking school. ”So I could pass my baccalaureat,” she explains. ”I have never had so much fun as in Montreal. I taught the kids French, I baby-sat, I went to school, I was a receptionist at a hairdresser`s, I danced and drank all night. I found that the more you do, the more you have time to do . . . it`s weird, non?”
It was in Montreal that Beart was discovered. She wasn`t sipping an ice-cream soda but sluicing down the street in 1982 when a talent scout for director Robert Altman ”approached me and asked if I was interested in acting. I didn`t even know who Altman was at the time.” Beart tested and was signed for the project-called ”The Eggs of Easter”-but the financing fell through.
”But even if I hadn`t met Robert Altman, I think everything would have happened the way it did. I was ripe, just looking for a way to express myself, and acting suddenly seemed the right channel,” Beart reflects.
After earning her baccalaureat in Montreal in 1983, Beart returned to France. Not to the hilltop village where her family lived near St. Tropez, but to Paris. ”I had made enough money with all my jobs in Montreal that I could afford to rent a tiny apartment in Paris,” she explains.
”Since a long time I had wanted to take a theater course, and I started one. And began attending casting calls for movies.” Beart recalls that almost immediately she got cast as ”a deluxe call girl” in a film called ”L`Amour en Douce” (1984). She followed up with a part in ”L`Amour Interdit” (1985). She met actor (and ”Manon” co-star) Daniel Auteuil on these films, and they began keeping company. They still are.
Though ”Date With an Angel” is her American movie debut, Beart is realistic about her chances of stardom on this side of the Atlantic. ”Leslie Caron is the only French actress who had a career here. And that includes attempts by Danielle Darrieux, Simone Simon, Simone Signoret and Catherine Deneuve.”
Beart says with a shrug, ”I stay in France. Better to be the queen of a village than a servant in a kingdom.”
