French actress Lea Seydoux will be bringing some heat to the next Bond film.

She has signed up to play the femme fatale in the new 007 adventure, which starts filming in six weeks.

The Paris-based star will meet fellow cast members, led by Daniel Craig, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw and Naomie Harris, for a script rehearsal in late November.

Before then, she will undergo a series of costume, make-up and camera tests so that director Sam Mendes and the film’s producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson can determine her ‘look’.

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Femme fatale: Paris-based star Lea Seydoux, pictured, will be bringing some heat to the next Bond film

Ms Seydoux has appeared in many French-language films, including the brilliant Cannes prize winner Blue Is The Warmest Colour.

Last year’s Cannes jury, which included Steven Spielberg and Nicole Kidman, were so knocked out by Seydoux and her co-star Adele Exarchopoulos’s performances as lovers that they insisted the actresses share the Palme d’Or (the festival’s highest honour) with director Abdellatif Kechiche.

Seydoux also appeared in Mission Impossible: Ghost Patrol and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

But if the phenomenal success of Skyfall, the last James Bond picture, is anything to go by, Seydoux will soon be a name known by speakers of all dialects.

The Bond 24 storyline originally called for an actress of Scandinavian origin, but that idea was dropped for one with French ooh-la-la.

There will also be an Italian connection — the 007 crew have scooted over to Rome to look for some Bond heavies.

Dot's spot on in Turner Masterpiece

Dorothy Atkinson enjoys watching people from afar. Sometimes her husband will tease her and go: ‘Dot, wind your neck in!’

‘I like to stare,’ the actress admitted. ‘There’re just too many interesting people on the train.’

She’ll call upon a gesture or a glance she’s spotted earlier, and use it when she’s acting.

Those tiny details help her build a character. She employs them in Mike Leigh’s masterpiece Mr Turner, his study of the life of landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, portrayed in a performance for the ages by Timothy Spall, who won the best acting award at Cannes.

Atkinson plays Hannah Danby, his housekeeper of 40 years. Any attention she received from Turner made the devoted Danby happy, even though the artist had a wandering eye. ‘Turner certainly used her, but she welcomed it,’ Dorothy told me.

Danby must have done something right, because Turner’s will allowed her to reside in a London property he owned until she died.

She’s a curious creature, Danby. Scurrying around Turner’s studio and keeping house — even though she probably wasn’t very good at it.

Atkinson inhabits her completely. When I met the actress in Cannes and later Toronto for their respective film festivals, it took me a few seconds to comprehend that I was looking at the same woman who’d portrayed Hannah Danby.

Captivating: Actress Dorothy Atkinson in Cannes (left)... and in Mike Leigh's masterpiece Mr Turner (right)

‘It’s real life that’s unfolding on screen in Mr Turner,’ she said, as we tucked into a cream tea at the Soho Hotel. That’s what’s so fascinating about the film. It is indeed unvarnished, real life.

Atkinson hails from Mansfield. ‘My dad worked at the Coal Board, and then at the local comprehensive. The town had an identity, and suddenly, when the miners’ strike came, it hadn’t.’

She used to tell her sister stories in the bedroom they shared. When someone gave her a book by Joyce Grenfell she would imitate her . . . and all her family. ‘My sister got fed up with the different voices and said: “Just be yourself!”’

Atkinson studied ballet, and then headed to drama school.

She met her husband, Martin Savage, when they were both acting in Leigh’s film Topsy-Turvy, and they now have a ten-year-old son.

Spirited: 20-year-old actor Ansel Elgort

Young star gives Winslet a lesson in how to tweet

Ansel Elgort and Kate Winslet had a spirited conversation about social media.

The pair worked together on the films Divergent and Insurgent, and the actress spotted him using his Twitter account.

‘She wanted to know what was the point of it. Wasn’t it just a waste of time?

‘I said social media, whether it be Twitter or Instagram, was important for people of my age, and I wasn’t being rude.

'I think there is this divide between young people who were raised as social media came into being, and those who weren’t.’

The 20-year-old actor was chatting to me when we met to discuss Men, Women & Children, a movie directed by Jason Reitman about a town in Texas, where residents get themselves in bother as a result of peering at screens.

Men, Women & Children is on at the BFI London Film Festival today and tomorrow evening.