Discovering the Devil in Julie Delpy

French actress Julie Delpy may look like an angel, but what makes her appealing on screen, she suspects, is the monster inside.

No less an authority than French New Wave director Jean-Luc Goddard, in fact, pronounced the flaxen-haired, porcelain-skinned actress to be a “little monster” when he cast her in her first film at the age of 14.

“I can be sweet, but my real personality is the opposite,” she explains in a syllabic French lilt. “You know, sometimes people look dangerous but there’s no surprise. . . . But somebody who looks, like, sweet, you don’t expect anything dangerous . . . That’s what (Goddard) meant.”

Delpy, 22, who was raised in a Parisian theatrical family, made her stage debut at the age of 5. “I do it since I’m a baby,” she says of her career, which has included roles in Agnieszka Holland’s “Europa Europa,” Bertrand Tavernier’s “La Passion Beatrice” and Carolos Saura’s “La Noche Oscura.” Her own acting models include Gena Rowlands and Bette Davis and, improbably, Charles Laughton.

In Delpy’s latest picture, “Voyager,” directed by Volker Schlondorff (“The Tin Drum”) and co-starring actor-playwright Sam Shepard, her character, Sabeth, is sweet and ethereal. “(Sabeth) was the romantic part of me,” she says. “She believes in love and all these beautiful things. . . . But maybe I’m more like Faber (the cynical Shepard character) than Sabeth.”

And in her next film, the multilingual actress plays--what else--a young woman mistaken for an angel. “Voyager” is now playing locally.