No way out now for Jeanne

Maureen Paton10 April 2012

Bob Geldof's French actress girlfriend, Jeanne Marine, arrives stark naked. As in naked from the neck up, without even a slick of lippy on the heart-shaped little Emmanuelle Beart face.

Dear God, she has everything: wide-apart dark-blue eyes, a pout she must have learned in the pram, cheekbones like organ stops, blonde - very blonde - hair and the devotion of the world's most dishevelled Irishman, Bob Geldof. Is the woman completely perfect, dammit?

"I'm not a natural blonde," she admits, giggling and curling her legs neatly underneath her on the chair to display a blue-denimed rump that would make a butcher's eyes water. Cute, petite and a bottle-blonde to dye for - now where, in the context of Bob, have we seen that combination before?

We meet in a windowless, black-painted basement to talk about Jeanne's first-ever English-language role as the agnes b-clad sex-kitten Estelle in Huis Clos (No Way Out), Jean-Paul Sartre's claustrophobic vision of the after-life with added Frank Sinatra songs and an Eiffel Tower dress by agnes b in a new Riverside Studios production.

Hell really is other people, it seems, what with the ghostly presence of Paula Yates hovering like a spectre at the feast and the director, Fast Show actor Colin McFarlane, playing bodyguard and editor throughout the interview to protect her from Bobisms and talk up future film plans for the production.

Not that Jeanne needs nurse-maiding; if she doesn't like the question, the tiny Parisian who supplanted Paula in Sir Bob's famously unmade bed pretends not to understand.

But it must be true love, for Jeanne has gone loyally grunge to match her man while Geldof has been teaching her an Oirish version of English for her role in No Way Out. She lives in fear, apparently, of sounding like Peter Sellers, an occupational hazard for all French actors speaking English.

"Bob 'elped me with the lines because I was so afraid of sounding like Clouseau," she confides. "We went on a 'oliday and I said, 'Please, please 'elp me'. So he read all the parts to help me." What, even Inez the predatory lesbian who lusts after Estelle?

"Yes, even Inez. My part of Estelle, too. But he didn't do it in a high voice. Irishmen love talking. I can't fit my words into the conversation at all, I just listen. Then he says, 'What did you say?' So I have to repeat it twice. It's quite funny. I have to speak very rapidly when I'm with Bob - but the French are good at that. He's very stylish, he's very elegant, he's lovely. Like Estelle, I need to have men loving me, but I only need one man.

"I hope I've found him. I think he's very attractive. He's a handsome man; but I can't say the opposite, can I?" she adds artfully.

A long-time friend of Dave Stewart, Jeanne is an Anglophile as well as a Celtophile and coos so much over the "old-fashioned English look" of Burberry raincoats that she'll be in danger of turning Bob Geldof into Paul Weller next.

"I love English pop music, though in France we have good hip hop now - it comes from Marseille. I would love to work more here in England. I love the Anglo-Saxon culture, the humour, Mr Bean. It's less bourgeois here, more relaxed. In France, if you experiment, you are an avantgardist or something like that. Here it's more cool; you don't have to be heavy."

Born Jeanne Lallemand, she changed her name to Marine because she was tired of being called La Boche (the German). She met Bob six years ago, just as the Geldofs' marriage-from-hell was in the final stages of disintegration.

It seems churlish to ask Jeanne, the Other Woman in Paula's divorce petition, what her worst Sartrean nightmare would be. But what the hell, I go ahead anyway. "You can be in hell in your life, you don't have to be dead for that," she concedes, adroitly side-stepping the question of Paula.

Her definition of hell, instead, is the stuffy Tube and the Eurostar tunnel of love between her haute bourgeois family's home in Paris, where she finds most of her work, and the London house she shares with Bob. To date, she has been known to British audiences only for a French-speaking role in Braveheart so tiny that Mel Gibson nicknamed her The Mouse. Not that she was always so dainty. "I wished to be a ballerina when I was a girl, but I was too fat.

"They called me Le Petit Boudin - the Little Sausage. But I did a lot of sport and yoga to lose weight." Now she happily pigs out on that oxymoron, English cuisine. "I love food, chocolate, though I hate baked beans; Bob loves them.

"But he is a great cook, I'm a crap cook." As if it matters in her case. Supremely comfortable in her well-fitting skin, this sleek little Frenchwoman is a match for Geldof in more ways than one. Unlike her predecessor, she's far too self-confident to have breast implants. "No, I wouldn't have plastic surgery. Why? We have more confident body language in France," says Marine, the not-to-be-underestimated little Mouse that roars.

No Way Out is at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, 14-16 September. Box office: 020 8237 1111.

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