The Daily Telegraph - October 20, 1999

'There is only one Brigitte - I am Laetitia'

First there was Bardot, then Mathieu, then Deneuve - now there is Casta. Patrick Bishop meets France's new Marianne.

The mayors of France have chosen well. Faced with the pleasant task of selecting a flesh-and-blood incarnation of Marianne, the bare-breasted symbol of Republican virtue, they have voted overwhelmingly for 21-year-old actress Laetitia Casta, a glance from whom would turn the most dedicated royalist into a raging, foam-flecked revolutionary.

Laetitia is taking the honour seriously. "I am very French," she says in a firm voice. "In my head and in my heart, I love my country."

We meet in her caravan at the end of a day's shooting on the Ile de la Cit� in Paris. She is starring in a wartime drama, La Bicyclette Bleue, based on a series of novels by Regine Desforges, for which role she has her hair pinned up and is wearing a red, Forties evening dress designed for her by Yves Saint Laurent. The look seems to reinforce her sturdy patriotism as she talks about becoming the face of France.

"For me, Marianne is about freedom, about the liberty of women," she says. "She's someone who is straight and is prepared to fight for what she believes in. She's someone who loves children and the family. As her, I can travel and share my country with the world."

Laetitia was chosen from five candidates who, between them, were meant to encapsulate the range and spirit of feminine achievement in France. The majority of the 16,000 mayors who cast a vote overlooked the achievements of an Olympic windsurfer, a top television journalist, the daughter in-law of veteran crooner Johnny Hallyday and the singer Patricia Kaas in favour of Laetitia's more traditional appeal.

Next month, a bust of her, sculpted by a woman, Marie-Paule Deville Chabrolle, will be unveiled and copies will be displayed in town halls all over the country. But the passion for Marianne does not grip France equally - some 20,000 of the 36,000 mayors entitled to vote chose not to do so, and in one village, close to the Swiss border, the mayor has already said he will not be installing the new sculpture of Laetitia. He will, he says, select an image from the ample stock of local women, regardless of age or looks.

Laetitia is the fourth official face of Marianne, after Brigitte Bardot, who was chosen in 1969, singer Mireille Mathieu and Catherine Deneuve. This is august company for a young woman, most of whose contemporaries are still at university or taking their first hesitant steps on the career ladder. But Laetitia has long been used to fame and success. She was "discovered" at the age of 15 while lying on a beach near her home in Corsica by a photographer who invited her to Paris to try out as a model.

"At first, I didn't like the idea," she says. "I thought, 'What do they want? Are they honest or are they weird?' My parents thought like me.

"Anyway, I went to see them with my father and we did some pictures over a weekend. I liked it; I expressed myself. It was something new and magical. After that, I did pictures every weekend after school."

She was quickly spotted by the fashion houses and glossy magazines and became France's best known model, working with Saint Laurent and Jean Paul Gaultier. Now she is an international star, the official body of Victoria's Secret, the American underwear chain. On visits to Italy, mounted policemen have had to be deployed to keep back the worshippers.

Since turning to acting, she has appeared in Asterix and Obelix versus Caesar, with Gerard Depardieu, and now is cast as a beautiful, plucky girl adrift on the stormy waters of occupied France.

Despite her success and her stunning looks, Laetitia has remained remarkably unaffected. She has good manners and takes trouble with her fans, cheerfully posing in the cold with a group of policemen at the end of the day's shoot.

Maintaining her sense of proportion is clearly something she works at. When I ask at what point she first realised she was beautiful, she gives a self-deprecating sigh. "You know, we are all the same really. Sometimes we think we are beautiful, sometimes we think we are ugly.

"When I was growing up in Corsica, nobody ever told me I was beautiful - never, never. They loved me for the way I was. It was better like that, otherwise I might have got a big head. As it is, I think I am just a normal girl."

Maybe so, but a normal girl with incandescent star quality. Last weekend, she gave a press conference and for more than an hour enchanted an audience of tough French journalists with her frankness and good humour. Sweetly, as one after another of the cassette recorders in front of her ran out of tape and clicked off, she picked up each and waved it to alert its owner.

She became mildly rattled at one point when she was pressed on her views about Corsican nationalism, and there was a momentary shadow of irritation when someone mentioned Brigitte Bardot. But the comparison is inevitable. She has the same stunning figure, the same pout and the same prelapsarian sensuality.

"I think it's a nice compliment," she says. "She's a wonderful woman. But I'm a little bit surprised when people talk about her and me. Why compare someone to somebody else? I think the compliment is too big for me. But there is only one Brigitte Bardot - I am Laetitia and I do different things."

Her new film may help her to carve her own niche. La Bicyclette Bleue tells the story of Lea, the 17-year-old daughter of a wealthy family that owns one of the best vineyards in Bordeaux. On the threshold of womanhood, she bicycles dreamily through the Bordelais countryside, raising to boiling point the blood-pressure of every man who encounters her.

Every man that is, except Laurent, who is in love with her best friend, Camille. When the war intervenes, Laurent goes off to join the Free French. Lea struggles gamely with the daily privations of life under the Germans and eventually joins the Resistance; Camille is murdered. Lea finds herself in Paris for the Liberation, where she encounters Laurent, who has just arrived with General Leclerc.

No effort has been spared in the search for verisimilitude - for the Liberation scenes, small parts of Paris have been time-warped 55 years. The transformation has had some disturbing effects. While Laetitia was filming a scene showing the Germans' arrival in Paris, she was approached by an elderly woman.

"She came up to me and said: 'I was there when this happened'. She had seen the actors' German uniforms and she didn't like it. It brought back all those memories."

Filming has made real to her what, for most women of her age, is ancient history. "I knew about the war, of course, but it really brought it home to me. Now, when I see an image on the television of a bomb exploding, I understand so much more."

She has had no formal training as an actress but seems to have worked hard at getting into the part and talks about her character as if she were real. "I like Lea very much - I want to be her. When I play her, I try very hard to understand her. She has become my best friend and has given me good lessons for life."

Such as?

"To be always straight and clear and honest and to fight for what you believe in with all your heart." Laetitia does not think that the film, which will be shown in three parts on French television next year, will necessarily lead to her becoming a full-time film actress. Appropriately for the new Marianne, notions of liberty and independence crop up frequently in her conversation and she resists the idea of a predictable career path.

"I like just to live day by day," she says. "With the film, I felt something push me to do what I liked and my instincts said to me, you should play this girl."

The reaction of the critics will not bother her, she claims. "I do it for myself. Even if it is no good, I did it and that's the only thing that matters."

For now, she is not so famous that she cannot enjoy some anonymity, particularly in London, where she has bought a flat in Covent Garden. She spends a lot of time there, and is recognised only by the army of French people living and working in the capital. And she guards her private life jealously, politely batting away questions about boyfriends.

But if things go on as they are, the hysteria is certain to mount. Does she ever, as she faces another interview or photocall, get the sinking realisation that this is how life will be for ever - that she is condemned to suffer constant invasions of privacy, and the unwavering attention of lunatics and voyeurs?

"Not really," she says, gaily. "I am someone who is free and everything I do, I control. I don't mean that in a bad way. What I mean is that I am like two people. I am the way you see me today, and I am also someone else, someone very simple."

That simplicity was demonstrated when she told the weekend press conference that the most beautiful thing she could imagine doing was to have a baby, a statement that reduced the male journalists present to mush.

She laughs when reminded about it. "Not now perhaps, because I am maybe still a baby myself. But I do think it's the most incredible thing I can do in life. I am always asking myself many questions about it."

The mayors of France have chosen well.