French screen legend Fanny Ardant: “I love everything dangerous” — salon.com

Topics: , , , , , , , , , , , , Entertainment News When Fanny Ardant became an international star in Francois Truffaut’s 1981 film “The Woman Next Door,” she was already 32 years old and decidedly not playing an ingénue. Perhaps, as Ardant suggested in our recent conversation, she was never innocent at all. Tall and dark-haired, with prominent features and formidable eyebrows, she was a forceful screen presence who sent powerful but conflicting signals. Ardant certainly had the looks and the temperament to be a 1940s femme fatale, but she was recognizably a liberated modern woman, a product of the turbulent French society of the ‘60s who had read Stendhal and Simone de Beauvoir with equal relish. As a married woman who winds up living next to her ex-flame (Gérard Depardieu) in Truffaut’s film, with predictable results, she never seemed to be in the grip of an unmanageable passion, but more like someone daring herself to screw up her life as badly as possible.

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