IN the soon-to-be released film Clouds of Sils Maria (one of the hot contenders at this year’s Cannes Film Festival), Juliette Binoche plays an actor grappling with the passing of years.

Her character, Maria, has been cast in the remake of the play that launched her career 30 years earlier – only this time she’s to play the mature protagonist.

Her original role, the ingénue, has gone to a young Hollywood usurper (Chloë Grace Moretz).

media_camera In real life Juliette Binoche has little in common with her role of a typecast actress in Clouds of Sils Maria.

The switch makes Maria question her identity, her future and her past.

In real life, 50-year-old Binoche has less in common with Maria than you might think.

While Hollywood can be dismissive of women “of a certain age” (something the likes of Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer have talked about repeatedly), she seems to have deftly avoided such a fate.

In fact, Binoche continues to gain pace – three movies out this year, four out next, and more multifarious roles than ever before.

media_camera ‘I’ve been on my own path with a lot of different directors from different worlds and languages’.

This year alone she’s handled roles as varied as engineer Sandra Brody in the blockbuster Godzilla and Rodin’s tortured lover in the French film Camille Claudel 1915 with equal grace.

Is European cinema perhaps kinder to mature actors? Binoche gives a Gallic shrug.

“I’ve been [on] my own path with a lot of different directors from different worlds and languages.

“I don’t really make a lot of French movies anyway.

“Very early on, I wanted to learn English because I wanted to work outside my own country.

“That was my ambition with a big ‘A’ – the key to my dream.”

media_camera Chloë Grace Moretz plays the ingenue role that launched Binoche’s character in Clouds of Sils Maria. Picture: Getty

In pictures, Binoche is gorgeous; in person, she is truly, startlingly beautiful.

It’s in her expression – the way her eyes sparkle; her big, generous smile – which is no doubt one of the reasons why Blue Illusion has chosen her to star in its spring ’14 campaign.

There’s also the French factor – Blue Illusion is an Aussie brand inspired by Parisian chic, something Binoche epitomises.

Another thing you notice is her ease: Binoche is stylish without trying.

She’s not an obvious fashionista, but she’s long understood the significance of clothes.

“When I was a teenager, the way I dressed was an identification to a group.

media_camera As a teenager Binoche ‘liked to be hidden; I was shy.’ Picture: Getty

“It was about trying to find out who you were… whether you liked to be hidden or show yourself – I liked to be hidden; I was shy,” she says.

“But now, being an actor, I look at clothes in a different way, because it has to do with character and storytelling.”

When she’s working, she admits to “sometimes thinking, ‘I want to look good!’,” but the demands of her characters always win.

Binoche says she doesn’t relate to the idea of being the “pin-up” leading actor.

media_camera Binoche, with Johnny Depp in Chocolat, has eschewed the seductive stereotype.

She was sexy in Chocolat and winsome in Wuthering Heights, but for every one of those romantic movies, there’s a grittier alternative.

Think Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy, Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, even in The English Patient she eschewed the seductive stereotype.

Take, for example, the comic extremity of her sexpot art dealer who enjoys a raunchy scene with Robert Pattinson in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis.

Binoche clearly throws herself into each role without care for her appearance.

media_camera ‘I am feminine, but I feel like I have this masculine strength.’ Picture: Getty

“That tradition that an actor must look good is more old-fashioned; now I think we’re allowed to be more wild, not judging ourselves outwardly,” she says.

When it comes to her personal style, Binoche keeps things simple, favouring jeans, a white T-shirt and “men’s shoes”.

“I am feminine, but I feel I have this masculine strength,” she says.

“I like to be comfortable, I like colours, but I’ll always put on a simple shirt, because it has a certain elegance.”

Binoche was born in Paris, the youngest daughter of an actress and a sculptor/theatre director.

Her parents divorced when she was four and she was sent to boarding school.

media_camera Binoche, in another scene from Chocolate, felt ‘abandoned’ by her parents who were divorced when she was four.

She felt abandoned by them, she says, and invented games and play-acting as a coping mechanism.

“I needed to play all the time.

“I think acting saved me – playing saved me,” she says.

“It prepared me for life, it was expanding the walls, and helping me to create worlds and feelings that were joyful and meaningful.”

At 15 she moved back to Paris to live with her older sister, Marion.

That’s when she fell in love with the city.

“I was so curious about things.

“I would go to museums, to shows, to the movies – my mother would tell me what I should go to see.

media_camera Parisian-born Binoche moved back to Paris at 15 after a stretch in boarding school.

“I was building this dream of Paris, where all the big things were happening, and I think deep down it’s stayed with me.”

She was 20 when she got her first big film break, working with cult director Jean-Luc Godard on his controversial Hail Mary.

“I had just come out of acting school.

I was full of admiration, obviously, and expectations, but bit by bit I learnt that he [Godard] had his own problems and his own difficulties when shooting,” she recalls.

media_camera Binoche with Jacek Ostczewski in the 1995 film Three Colours Blue.

“I felt he was in his own world and he wasn’t going to help me, a young actor.

“That was a real epiphany for me, realising, ‘OK, I can’t expect anything of a director.

I can’t ask for anything’.”

Since then she’s worked with countless big names, though she is famously finicky about the projects she chooses.

She’s turned down Steven Spielberg three times (for Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List).

Today she is one of the few actors in the world to boast a triple-threat trophy room – BAFTA, Oscar and César (France’s national film award) – and still calls Paris home.

media_camera Binoche’s son Benoit Magimel, right, wih actress Pascale Arbillot in Little White Lies

She lives with her children (Raphaël, 20, and Hana, 14) in the wealthy suburb of Vaucresson.

As a single parent (she is famously guarded about the fathers of her children: André Halle, a professional scuba diver, and actor Benoit Magimel), she says she remained in France for their benefit.

“My conscience tells me I need to stay here for my children, so they can see their fathers.

If I didn’t have children, I would have moved to New York.”

When at home, she likes to spend time in her garden (“I need to see trees and to hear birds”), and she reads and paints when she has a moment of downtime.

“I don’t know what switching off means.

Yes, I get tired, but I get energy from learning something new or in doing something with my kids.”

For Binoche, walking the red carpet is just another part: “I go for it, because that’s the role I am playing.

When I wake up at home, I’m not an actress; I’m just myself.”

Download the Sunday Style app here