Ardent Is the Perfect Word for Fanny Ardant : Movies: The French actress may be unfamiliar to Americans, but ‘Colonel Chabert’--in which she is reunited with Gerard Depardieu--may change that.

In the course of an interview at Manhattan’s chic Paramount Hotel, French actress Fanny Ardant twice mimics a dog. The first time, it serves as punctuation to a spirited defense of the cunning Countess Ferraud, the character she plays in “Colonel Chabert,” the new Gerard Depardieu film set in 19th-Century France, which opened last week.

“She is a self-made woman,” Ardant says in thick-accented English about the prostitute-turned-countess whose aristocratic world is suddenly thrown into jeopardy by the return of her first husband (Depardieu), long thought to be dead. “She shows herself stronger than she is, but she is not to be like a dog following the rules of society.”

The second time comes when she is talking about her choice of a college thesis, a defense of anarchy written for a political science degree. “I chose anarchy,” she says, smiling at her youthful rebellion. “Everyone else was choosing this party or that party, this system or that system. But power comes from the individual, not from some party. It is terrible to be told what to do, what to think, like a dog. I would hate that.”

Ardant certainly needn’t worry about ever being confused with the dumb obedience associated with man’s best friend. For one thing, she cuts much too striking and sensuous a figure in her chic convent-girl outfit: mid-calf black jumper over a white blouse, her dark tresses falling over a swan neck. For another she exudes the same vitality that the late director Francois Truffaut--who introduced her to film audiences in 1981 with his movie “The Woman Next Door”--claimed to have been bewitched by.

“I was seduced by her large mouth, her large black eyes, her triangular face,” the famous director said when he first spotted her in a 1979 French television miniseries. “I immediately recognized in her the qualities I most often expect in my protagonists: vitality, enthusiasm, humor, intensity--but also . . . a taste for secrets, a wild side, a hint of savagery, and above all something vibrant.”

The collaboration between Truffaut and Ardant would yield another film, “Confidentially Yours,” and a daughter, now 11. (She has two other daughters, 19 and 5 1/2.) Although the well-known European actress went on to work with such stellar directors as Volker Schlondorff (“Swann in Love”), Alain Resnais (“Life Is a Bed of Roses”) and Costa-Gavras (“Family Lawyer”), American audiences have had few opportunities to see Ardant’s work. “Colonel Chabert” may change that.

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Based on Honore de Balzac’s novel, the Yves Angelo film paints a compelling portrait of a shrewish, calculating woman caught in a vortex between two men in post-Napoleonic France. Money and love are the glue that cements the whore, Rose Chapotel, and the dashing Chabert, who wins her in a card game. Money and power bind Rose and her Count Ferraud (Andre Dussollier) after Chabert’s “death” in battle leaves her wealthy enough to buy a precarious perch in French society. When the colonel returns to reclaim his wife, the stakes of their dangerous games grow considerably higher.

The materialistic countess Ferraud--as grand and aristocratic as only a one-time whore can be--is cloaked in the movie with more ambiguity and moral contradictions than in Balzac’s book, to the delight of the woman who plays her.

“She is greedy, a crook, a liar, but I like her very much,” says the actress, a voracious reader who’d become acquainted with the book in her youth. “When you earn your life on your back, you understand where every penny comes from. But she is not ashamed of her past, and she is a very smart business woman. She invests the wealth Chabert leaves her, putting it into factories at a time when the opportunities for women were very limited. In that way, she is a very modern woman, a fantastic American woman!”

If Ardant is somewhat in awe of the entrepreneurial and independent spirit of American women, it is partly because of an upbringing in Monte Carlo that she describes as “very bourgeois and very classical.” The youngest of five children born to a French military officer and his wife, Ardant was packed off to convent schools at an early age. She completely rejected the bourgeois lifestyle in favor of a Bohemian free-spiritedness that ran afoul of her strict mother who worried about the neighbors’ gossip. Having three children out of wedlock no doubt has kept the tongues wagging.

“Monte Carlo was all playboys and very well-coiffed ladies, and my response to everything was ‘No,’ ” she says. “ ‘Do you want to dance?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you want to come with me?’ ‘No.’ I thought I will never be a wife, never follow a husband, never do a boring job just to make money. I think, maybe now I was a little stupid. At my mother’s home, you open the cupboards and everything is in order, sheets fresh and clean and perfectly ironed. I see this and I want to be a child again.”

After college she began studying acting in Paris and was quickly playing the classics onstage, which eventually led to her role in the five-part World War I television drama “Women of the Coast.” The fateful letter from Truffaut followed.

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“We were a concourse of shyness when we met,” Ardant says. But they clicked, and Truffaut wrote his next film expressly for her, “The Woman Next Door.” Her dark and sensual talents were showcased in the role of a woman on the verge who resumes an affair with a married man (Depardieu) to disastrous consequences. It brought her international attention, another film with Truffaut, and a daughter.

While Ardant refuses to discuss her personal life (when asked who fathered her other two daughters, she smiles sweetly and says with a shrug, “Who knows?”), the actress praises Truffaut as a true romantic artist who influenced her with his generous and democratic spirit. “He taught me that it was not your profession that defined you but the passion that you put into it. For Truffaut, the film set was the most important place to be.”

Ardant claims the same generosity and passion for Depardieu, with whom she is reunited on screen for the first time in 13 years. “Like Chabert, Depardieu is a peasant,” she says. “So his feet are rooted in the earth and his head is in the clouds. That makes him a genius. He is poetic and pragmatic, sensual and a little boy, sweet and suddenly like a bull.”

Much the same might be said of Ardant, despite her middle-class roots. When she returns to Paris, where she lives with her three daughters, the actress begins rehearsals for a Marguerite Duras play, “La Musica.” The stage is her real passion, “because I love the word,” she says. “In the theater I want to sing, to fly. I don’t want to say, ‘Pass the salt.’ ”

Ardant says she knew she was destined for theater early on because she could never keep her mouth shut when she was reading books around the house. “If I am reading something that I loved, like ‘Madame Bovary’ or Henry Miller or (F. Scott) Fitzgerald, I would shout out sections of the book to my sisters, because when something is beautiful, you must share it with someone else, no? I am very primitive that way.”

Ardant’s enthusiasm for film is equally infectious and, by her own admission, naive. “Orson Welles’ ‘Magnificent Ambersons’ . . . formidable!” she trills at one point. “And Woody Allen, and his ‘Hannah and Her Sisters,’ it gives me energy to live when I see a film like that. You are thinking before, ‘Oh my life, it is such a disaster.’ But then you see this movie and suddenly, your life is in focus. And then you think, ‘Yes, it is a disaster, but it is my life, and I am going to live it!’ This I learned too, first from my father and then from Truffaut: Life is a flying carpet. You take it and just go!”