Roles off the usual tongue

Most foreign actors jump at a chance to work in a Hollywood production -- more money, free English lessons and the global exposure that only the American movie machine can offer. But English-speaking actors including Kristin Scott Thomas, Charlotte Rampling, John Malkovich, Jodie Foster and Molly Ringwald have pursued separate careers in European productions that often receive limited or no release in the United States.

Kristin Scott Thomas, who moved to Paris at age 18 and married a French doctor, with whom she has three children, has made at least a dozen French films. Foster, who speaks impeccably accented French honed at French lycee, made a handful of French movies in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, and Ringwald, who went to Paris after her success in the ‘80s, spent part of the 1990s doing French films. Malkovich, who has spent much of the last 10 years living in France, has performed in French films, including playing Javert in a TV miniseries of “Les Miserables” in 2000 and Charles Talleyrand in a 2002 miniseries, “Napoleon.”

This fall, Americans Chloe Sevigny and Connie Nielsen both speak French in Olivier Assayas’ French- and English-language “Demonlover.” And fans of British actor Jeremy Irons can hear him speak Franglais in Claude Lelouch’s “And Now Ladies & Gentlemen,” which opened Aug. 1, in which he plays a gentleman jewel thief alongside French singer Patricia Kaas.

“I’ve always believed that for a long-lasting career, you’ve gotta have a broad base,” says Irons, who spoke Polish in a 1982 film called “Moonlighting,” “and there are very interesting directors in Europe, so it just seemed that if I could go wider....” “Ladies & Gentlemen,” which closed the 2002 Cannes festival in an out-of-competition slot, is his third French-language film, after “Swann in Love” in 1984 and “Australia” in 1989. One indication of his popularity in France was an honorary Cesar (the French Oscar) he won in 2002. If there’s anything the French like more than a talented Anglo-Saxon actor, it’s one who speaks French at the awards ceremony.

“The French do seem to like my work -- which is good and always rather surprising,” he says by phone. “They put up with my French, and my French isn’t particularly good, but they accept it. The French love cinema and have an intelligence and a history about cinema which I think a modern American audience has only in the cities -- I mean, in some of the cities. The thing about Europe is that they tend to like what I would wincingly call art movies. And because it’s those films and those directors that appeal to me, the work that I think is interesting is appreciated in Europe and probably not seen in America except by a few. Most of the films that you haven’t seen would have been seen by a French audience, whereas something like ‘Man in the Iron Mask,’ which had a moderate success in America, is a bit laughed at in France.”

Liked in France

The French are not the only ones to favor nonnative performers, but France has always been particularly enthusiastic about foreign actors, and not just the English-speaking kind. The legendary late Austrian German actress Romy Schneider was an icon of French cinema in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and popular actors in France today include Spaniard Sergi Lopez and Monica Bellucci, an Italian who often acts with her French husband, Vincent Cassel.

French director Francois Ozon says he has used foreigners in each of his movies, all of which have been made in French except his most recent, “Swimming Pool,” which is in English and French and stars Charlotte Rampling, a Briton who made a comeback starring in his 2001 film “Under the Sand.” His 2000 film “Water Drops on Burning Rocks” featured American Anna Thomson, and 1999’s “Criminal Lovers” included Yugoslav actor Miki Manojlovic.

“I like actors who speak with an accent,” Ozon says. “I always find that beautiful. It adds a strangeness in relation to the maternal language, to hear how others express themselves.” But he says the token foreigner plays a larger symbolic role in a story line. “The fact of being a foreigner, to speak in a foreign language, allows characters to try to enter into the world of others but at the same time to watch what happens. My characters are often those who are there but at the same time aren’t there, who observe what’s going on.”

“Ladies & Gentlemen” is based on a real story of a British employee who stole from Lelouch, then returned a decade later to pay him back after surviving a life-threatening illness. In his mind, Lelouch says, he had to have an English speaker in the role. “He had a hard time in French,” Lelouch says of Irons. “But that’s part of the charm of the film. I always loved accents. I think it’s an act of courage, to speak another language. It’s like showing yourself naked.”

Irons veers between English and French in the film, slip-ups and all. “We didn’t write them in,” Lelouch says, “but we were very happy when he made them.”

Lelouch says he needed “un gentleman” for the story of Valentin Valentin, a charming international jewelry thief who starts to lose his memory from a brain disorder and falls in love with a French lounge singer with the same affliction. “We don’t act in the same manner with foreign women,” Lelouch says. “Because we have the desire to explain things a bit more, we’re afraid of misunderstandings, we repeat things, we are obliged to speak more slowly, and that’s wonderful, that’s very photogenic.”

The director says he had a hard time choosing between Irons and Malkovich, who are popular with European audiences. “They are two actors who like, I think, Europe -- and France in particular,” Lelouch says by phone. “In American films, John and Jeremy are treated as the bad guys. In France we are a bit broader. I like actors who can play the role of the jerk and the hero.”

Irons learned French at school and works with a voice coach for each of his movies. “I get a bit lazy on vocabulary and constructions,” he says, “but I think they find it a bit charming.” During the making of “Swann in Love,” he says, his voice coach told him his French sounded “a bit fey.” So he tried barking like a Parisian in a boulangerie and says the woman behind the counter seemed to find it perfectly normal. “Now I attack the language,” he says, “and I don’t have that slight on-the-back-foot apologetic-ness of an Englishman speaking a foreign language.”

Living abroad

Malkovich, whose wife is French and whose children have grown up in France, calls himself “a pathetic student.” “I don’t speak French well -- I have no business acting in French,” he says. “So in a way it’s a sort of appalling arrogance, but, I mean, I can’t help it, I like to do it. It’s fun for me, it interests me. I like starting over. I can make English do anything I want it to do.... French is a very different language, of course, because there isn’t emphasis, there isn’t stress. And for an actor it takes away your principal job -- to say what you want to say through the language. I have a great French coach and we just fight all day long.”

Malkovich says he was astonished to be asked to play famous French literary characters.

“It’s kind of provocative to have cast me to do that in French,” he says. “It’s hard, but I looked at it sort of as, ‘You’re lucky to have a job, especially a good job in a language you don’t speak.’ I mean, it’s really quite amazing.”

Perhaps the greatest symbol of the Anglo-Saxon in French popular culture is Jane Birkin, the actress-singer and former wife of the legendary French singer Serge Gainsbourg who is currently touring a show called “Arabesque” around the world that features her singing Arab-orchestrated versions of his songs (in French).

“Contrary to everything that is said about them, I think the French open their arms to people who come to France and make the smallest effort to speak French,” says Birkin, who is more famous in France, where she has lived for 35 years, than in her native England. “I don’t have one English friend in Paris and don’t want one. I think that they’re the most welcoming of creatures, these French. The wonderful Napoleon went over and said to the Jews in Spain, ‘You’re welcome to be French if you’ll fit into our system.’ He didn’t want to miss out on anyone who was witty or talented, he was no fool. If you look at the people who the French like most, it was Romy Schneider, Petula Clark, my good self, Charlotte Rampling, Kristin Scott Thomas. So I maintain that that means they like strangers.”

Birkin herself is an exotic incarnation, stranded somewhere between Britain and France. “I make mistakes in French that French people know but I don’t know I’m making,” she says, “and I think in England I can sound a little archaic, a bit like P.G. Wodehouse or the queen, because I haven’t sort of shifted from when I left. I probably sound strange and English people have told me so, they find that quaint and actually humorous. I’m in difficulties when I’m asked to speak really proper French in a French movie -- perfectly ordinary French is not the way I speak French. What I do love is a lovely new word, so I’d rather add that on. I think I’m past the grammar.”

Birkin says that people still come up to her in the street and make fun of her (still very thick) accent. “They think that’s sort of jolly,” she says. “But I then realize how badly I speak.”

Her late husband once told her that losing her accent would mean losing the love of the French. “I was in fear of that,” Birkin says, “but I do get a bit tired of people imitating your accent as if you were speaking quite as badly as 25 or 35 years ago. I certainly have made progress. I mean, I’ve practically got a German accent now, I’ve tried so hard.”