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News.com.au
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
What Leonardo DiCaprio's The Beach love interest looks like now
She achieved global stardom alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in trippy thriller The Beach. And that same year the stunning French actress became the face of L'Oreal after signing a lucrative contract. But rather than chasing bumper paycheques in Hollywood blockbusters, Virginie Ledoyen, 48, was content to pursue passion projects in her native France. One of these was the award-winning 2002 hit 8 Women, which featured esteemed French actresses Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Béart. Fast-forward 23 years and stylish mum-of-three Virginie looks just as radiant as she did at the turn of the millennium. Virginie was already a rising star in France prior to working with DiCaprio in the late 90s. She received prestigious César Award nominations for her work in A Single Girl, Les marmottes and L'eau froide. Staying true to herself, Virginie became a mum aged 24, refusing to swap her baby dream for superstardom. She reasoned to The Standard in 2012: ' … maybe because my mother had me young, I always wanted to have a baby. It was just obvious to me. And I wanted that baby so much, it was not even an issue.' Virginie's eldest daughter Lila was born in 2001 from her relationship with production designer Louis Soubrier. She also has a son called Isaac, 14, and an 11-year-old daughter called Amalia from her relationship with Arie Elmaleh. In between her child-bearing partnerships she was briefly married to director Iain Rogers, divorcing him after a year in 2007. In many ways, the biggest thing she learned from her foray into international cinema was that she didn't want the success bestowed upon leading man DiCaprio. While she was full of praise for him in an interview with The Guardian, calling him 'a great actor. Intense, emotional, intelligent,' she saw the struggle he endured offset. She candidly said: 'DiCaprio's life is the perfect example of how not to be. 'I would not wish his life on anybody. I can understand how it might seem a bit flattering to be in every newspaper and to have everyone imagining how your life must be. But frankly it's not. 'When you see this poor guy being followed everywhere he goes by hordes of people, it's actually terribly sad. Nobody should live like that.' The film was an adaptation of Alex Garland's novel and was directed by Danny Boyle. In it, DiCaprio's backpacker character, Richard, befriends fellow tourists, Françoise [Ledoyen] and Étienne [Guillaume Canet]. Together, they discover an uninhabited paradise island near Thailand. It emerges other likeminded people have set up a small community in the idyllic location and, while initially harmonious, the group dynamic soon takes a dark turn. Money has never been a driving factor in Virginie's decision making process. Her association with L'Oreal brought in enough money to keep her content while she cherry-picked projects. 'I didn't want to go to Hollywood in order to play the French girl who always wants to be nude,' she said. 'I wanted to keep working in Europe. And I would never accept a film because of the money. I have enough money. I don't need to be getting $20m a movie.' That's not to say she doesn't have a strong work ethic. Credits have been continuous over the last two decades and most recently she appeared on television in four-part drama The Au Pair starring David Suchet.
Scottish Sun
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Stunning actress has barely aged – 25 years after steamy DiCaprio blockbuster
The star said she wouldn't wish DiCaprio's lifestyle on her worst enemy OH LA LA Stunning actress has barely aged – 25 years after steamy DiCaprio blockbuster SHE achieved global stardom alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in trippy thriller The Beach. And that same year the stunning French actress became the face of L'Oreal after signing a lucrative contract. Advertisement 4 Virginie Ledoyen looks fantastic 15 years after The Beach Credit: Getty 4 She became the face of L'Oreal in 2000 Credit: Getty But rather than chasing bumper paycheques in Hollywood blockbusters, Virginie Ledoyen, 48, was content to pursue passion projects in her native France. One of these was the award-winning 2002 hit 8 Women, which featured esteemed French actresses Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Béart. Fast-forward 23 years and stylish mum-of-three Virginie looks just as radiant as she did at the turn of the millennium. Virginie was already a rising star in France prior to working with DiCaprio in the late 90s. Advertisement READ MORE ON LEO DICAPRIO LEAN-O DICAPRIO World's most famous DiCaprio lookalike fighting for Putin seen on frontline She received prestigious César Award nominations for her work in A Single Girl, Les marmottes and L'eau froide. Staying true to herself, Virginie became a mum aged 24, refusing to swap her baby dream for superstardom. She reasoned to The Standard in 2012: "...maybe because my mother had me young, I always wanted to have a baby. It was just obvious to me. And I wanted that baby so much, it was not even an issue." Virginie's eldest daughter Lila was born in 2001 from her relationship with production designer Louis Soubrier. Advertisement She also has a son called Isaac, 14, and an 11-year-old daughter called Amalia from her relationship with Arie Elmaleh. In between her child-bearing partnerships she was briefly married to director Iain Rogers, divorcing him after a year in 2007. Leonardo Dicaprio's changing face through the ages as he turns 50 In many ways, the biggest thing she learned from her foray into international cinema was that she didn't want the success bestowed upon leading man DiCaprio. While she was full of praise for him in an interview with The Guardian, calling him "a great actor. Intense, emotional, intelligent," she saw the struggle he endured offset. Advertisement She candidly said: "DiCaprio's life is the perfect example of how not to be. "I would not wish his life on anybody. I can understand how it might seem a bit flattering to be in every newspaper and to have everyone imagining how your life must be. But frankly it's not. "When you see this poor guy being followed everywhere he goes by hordes of people, it's actually terribly sad. Nobody should live like that." The film was an adaptation of Alex Garland's novel and was directed by Danny Boyle. Advertisement In it, DiCaprio's backpacker character, Richard, befriends fellow tourists, Françoise [Ledoyen] and Étienne [Guillaume Canet]. Together, they discover an uninhabited paradise island near Thailand. It emerges other likeminded people have set up a small community in the idyllic location and, while initially harmonious, the group dynamic soon takes a dark turn. Money has never been a driving factor in Virginie's decision making process. Her association with L'Oreal brought in enough money to keep her content while she cherry-picked projects. Advertisement "I didn't want to go to Hollywood in order to play the French girl who always wants to be nude," she said. "I wanted to keep working in Europe. And I would never accept a film because of the money. I have enough money. I don't need to be getting $20m a movie." That's not to say she doesn't have a strong work ethic. Credits have been continuous over the last two decades and most recently she appeared on British television in four part Channel 5 drama The Au Pair starring David Suchet. Advertisement 4 Virginie as Françoise in The Beach Credit: Alamy 4 She rejected Hollywood for life in France Credit: Alamy
The Irish Sun
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Irish Sun
Stunning actress has barely aged – 25 years after steamy DiCaprio blockbuster
SHE achieved global stardom alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in trippy thriller The Beach. And that same year the stunning French actress became the face of L'Oreal after signing a lucrative contract. Advertisement 4 Virginie Ledoyen looks fantastic 15 years after The Beach Credit: Getty 4 She became the face of L'Oreal in 2000 Credit: Getty But rather than chasing bumper paycheques in Hollywood blockbusters, Virginie Ledoyen, 48, was content to pursue passion projects in her native France. One of these was the award-winning 2002 hit 8 Women, which featured esteemed French actresses Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Béart. Fast-forward 23 years and stylish mum-of-three Virginie looks just as radiant as she did at the turn of the millennium. Virginie was already a rising star in France prior to working with DiCaprio in the late 90s. Advertisement READ MORE ON LEO DICAPRIO She received prestigious César Award nominations for her work in A Single Girl, Les marmottes and L'eau froide. Staying true to herself, Virginie became a mum aged 24, refusing to swap her baby dream for superstardom. She reasoned to Virginie's eldest daughter Lila was born in 2001 from her relationship with production designer Louis Soubrier. Advertisement Most read in Celebrity She also has a son called Isaac, 14, and an 11-year-old daughter called Amalia from her relationship with Arie Elmaleh. In between her child-bearing partnerships she was briefly married to director Iain Rogers, divorcing him after a year in 2007. Leonardo Dicaprio's changing face through the ages as he turns 50 In many ways, the biggest thing she learned from her foray into international cinema was that she didn't want the While she was full of praise for him in an interview with Advertisement She candidly said: "DiCaprio's life is the perfect example of how not to be. "I would not wish his life on anybody. I can understand how it might seem a bit flattering to be in every newspaper and to have everyone imagining how your life must be. But frankly it's not. "When you see this poor guy being followed everywhere he goes by hordes of people, it's actually terribly sad. Nobody should live like that." The film was an adaptation of Alex Garland's novel and was directed by Danny Boyle. Advertisement In it, DiCaprio's backpacker character, Richard, befriends fellow tourists, Françoise [Ledoyen] and Étienne [Guillaume Canet]. Together, Thailand . It emerges other likeminded people have set up a small community in the idyllic location and, while initially harmonious, the group dynamic soon takes a dark turn. Money has never been a driving factor in Virginie's decision making process. Her association with L'Oreal brought in enough money to keep her content while she cherry-picked projects. Advertisement "I didn't want to go to Hollywood in order to play the French girl who always wants to be nude," she said. "I wanted to keep working in Europe . And I would never accept a film because of the money. I have enough money. I don't need to be getting $20m a movie." That's not to say she doesn't have a strong work ethic. Credits have been continuous over the last two decades and most recently she appeared on British television in four part Channel 5 drama The Au Pair starring David Suchet. Advertisement 4 Virginie as Françoise in The Beach Credit: Alamy 4 She rejected Hollywood for life in France Credit: Alamy
The Sun
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Stunning actress has barely aged – 25 years after steamy DiCaprio blockbuster
SHE achieved global stardom alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in trippy thriller The Beach. And that same year the stunning French actress became the face of L'Oreal after signing a lucrative contract. 4 4 But rather than chasing bumper paycheques in Hollywood blockbusters, Virginie Ledoyen, 48, was content to pursue passion projects in her native France. One of these was the award-winning 2002 hit 8 Women, which featured esteemed French actresses Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Béart. Fast-forward 23 years and stylish mum-of-three Virginie looks just as radiant as she did at the turn of the millennium. Virginie was already a rising star in France prior to working with DiCaprio in the late 90s. She received prestigious César Award nominations for her work in A Single Girl, Les marmottes and L'eau froide. Staying true to herself, Virginie became a mum aged 24, refusing to swap her baby dream for superstardom. She reasoned to The Standard in 2012: "...maybe because my mother had me young, I always wanted to have a baby. It was just obvious to me. And I wanted that baby so much, it was not even an issue." Virginie's eldest daughter Lila was born in 2001 from her relationship with production designer Louis Soubrier. She also has a son called Isaac, 14, and an 11-year-old daughter called Amalia from her relationship with Arie Elmaleh. In between her child-bearing partnerships she was briefly married to director Iain Rogers, divorcing him after a year in 2007. In many ways, the biggest thing she learned from her foray into international cinema was that she didn't want the success bestowed upon leading man DiCaprio. While she was full of praise for him in an interview with The Guardian, calling him "a great actor. Intense, emotional, intelligent," she saw the struggle he endured offset. She candidly said: "DiCaprio's life is the perfect example of how not to be. "I would not wish his life on anybody. I can understand how it might seem a bit flattering to be in every newspaper and to have everyone imagining how your life must be. But frankly it's not. "When you see this poor guy being followed everywhere he goes by hordes of people, it's actually terribly sad. Nobody should live like that." The film was an adaptation of Alex Garland's novel and was directed by Danny Boyle. In it, DiCaprio's backpacker character, Richard, befriends fellow tourists, Françoise [Ledoyen] and Étienne [Guillaume Canet]. Together, they discover an uninhabited paradise island near Thailand. It emerges other likeminded people have set up a small community in the idyllic location and, while initially harmonious, the group dynamic soon takes a dark turn. Money has never been a driving factor in Virginie's decision making process. Her association with L'Oreal brought in enough money to keep her content while she cherry-picked projects. "I didn't want to go to Hollywood in order to play the French girl who always wants to be nude," she said. "I wanted to keep working in Europe. And I would never accept a film because of the money. I have enough money. I don't need to be getting $20m a movie." That's not to say she doesn't have a strong work ethic. Credits have been continuous over the last two decades and most recently she appeared on British television in four part Channel 5 drama The Au Pair starring David Suchet. 4 4
The Independent
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
François Ozon: ‘I was a very perverse child – I loved the idea of my aunt trying to kill us all'
When he was still in his teens, sometime in the late Eighties, the filmmaker François Ozon asked his little brother to kill their family for him. Before anyone panics, this was play-acting, and for a movie. Photo de Famille was a scrappy, seven-minute blueprint for the kinds of films that would, a decade later, transform Ozon into the mischievous French prince of lust, provocation and psychosexual chaos. His brother agreed to it. As did his family. In the film, 'my brother gave some poison to my mother and smothered my father', Ozon remembers. 'And he cut the throat of my sister with a pair of scissors.' Did they mind participating in such a thing? Ozon grins. 'My mother said, 'yes, we will do that in your film because we know you wouldn't do that in reality'.' Even with that origin story in mind, Ozon's creative penchant for sex and death tends to be overstated. Yes, the 57-year-old's most internationally successful movies – the candy-coloured whodunnit 8 Women (2002), or the Charlotte Rampling murder mystery Swimming Pool (2003) – are awash in the stuff, but his output bends more diverse. There's the bittersweet coming-of-age tale (2020's Summer of 85), the Hitchcockian psycho-thriller (2017's Double Lover), the other one involving Rampling and a body of water (the tender, mesmeric Under the Sand from 2000). He's made more or less a film a year since 1997, and likes to sew a degree of tonal unease into most of them. Just when you're getting comfortable in a particular genre, out comes another one. Take When Autumn Falls, his 24th feature, which is in cinemas this week. It begins as a bucolic slice-of-life drama, with Hélène Vincent – playing Michelle, a retiree and devoted grandmother – tending to her garden and meeting with friends in a village in Burgundy. Then her stressed daughter Valérie (Swimming Pool 's Ludivine Sagnier) arrives, then a poisonous mushroom lands her grandson in hospital, then her very dysfunctional past comes to light. There are apparitions and police interrogations. Cryptic ex-cons fresh from jail. By the time a character mysteriously plummets to their death at the midpoint of When Autumn Falls, all you can do is let the film's pure, unadulterated Ozoniness wash over you. The film was loosely inspired by an incident in Ozon's own childhood, in which his aunt accidentally poisoned several members of the family with wild mushrooms. 'I loved the idea of my aunt trying to kill us all,' he laughs. 'I was a very perverse child, as you can see. Or just a future director.' Sitting in the corner of the cavernous library of London's French Institute, Ozon is dressed in a crimson jacket and black trousers, a scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. His sunglasses are on, and mostly stay on. Looking at Ozon is akin to looking at an illustration of a Frenchman drawn from memory, and he speaks in a boyish, lightly dishy register. He tells me he loved working with the 81-year-old Vincent on the film because she really looks like an 81-year-old. 'Some French actresses have so much plastic surgery that they don't have age anymore,' he says. 'I won't give you names, but you know who I'm thinking of, don't you?' He giggles. 'And I've worked with them!' In all seriousness, though, he says he understands social and industry pressure to maintain a youthful appearance, but also loves lines and loose skin – he'd sometimes shoot Vincent in extreme close-up just to show it off. 'That's not possible for some actresses. Sometimes you prefer not to go too close with the camera because it's not real anymore. You don't see the expression.' Whether their faces move or not, female actors of a certain age have lined up to work with Ozon for more than 20 years, ever since he revitalised Rampling's career with Under the Sand. He was in his early thirties at that point, but had enough resolve to insist upon her casting despite worry from the film's backers. 'She was considered, at that time, totally forgotten,' he says. 'Her career was stopped. All the French financiers said to me, 'don't work with her – she's finished'. Helpfully, I didn't follow them, and the film was successful.' That led to 8 Women, in which he pulled together a murderer's row of divas – including Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Béart – to play the suspects in a country house crime. 'When the cast was announced, everybody wanted to come to the set to see the catfights,' he laughs. 'All the media was convinced it would be a disaster, and impossible with so many egos on the same film. But they were wrong.' He thinks it would have been different if it were called 8 Men. 'Actresses are clever. They are cinephiles. They are not afraid to work with young directors. Men?' He shrugs. 'The egos of male actors can be huge. For women, there is a kind of sisterhood and solidarity.' 8 Women arrived at a time in Ozon's career that saw him shift away from the barbed, button-pushing sensibility that had defined his early work – 1998's Sitcom, which shot him to fame, was an overheated satire of the modern family, boasting orgies, sadomasochism and full-frontal nudity. It saw him dubbed the enfant terrible of Nineties French filmmaking, with more shades of his American contemporary Todd Solondz than an Éric Rohmer or a Michel Audiard. 'I was looking for me,' he says. 'It was instinctive. Maybe I was more provocative in the form?' He shrugs again, admitting that he struggles to look back at his older films. 'They are like children I've abandoned,' he laughs, 'and I don't analyse them.' He points at me. 'That is your job.' He's evolved, at least. Much like Spain's Pedro Almodóvar – who, god forbid, panned away from a sex scene in one of his recent films – Ozon's modern eroticism tends to be a little more tasteful than it used to be. It's not by design, he insists. It's cultural. 'You can see so many sex scenes on your telephone today, so sex naturally felt more transgressive 20 years ago. Sometimes I think directors would actually welcome back the Hays Code [the puritanical guidelines for American filmmakers in force between the years of 1934 and 1968] just so you can rebel against something.' The filming of sex scenes is also changing, as he's learnt while planning his next movie, an adaptation of Albert Camus' The Outsider. 'I need to work with a coordinator of intimacy,' he says. 'It didn't exist before.' He says he's not had an issue with shooting them himself. 'I always share information with my actors – what position I want them in, which part of the body I want to show, and I ask for their point of view. It's never been a problem. But it's better now – there are some directors, especially in French cinema, who push the limits when it comes to making sex scenes.' That's partly because filmmakers in France, he says, hold enormous cultural and social sway. People don't tend to say no. 'The director is king. We have the power.' And it's also one of the reasons he's never been tempted by America, despite fielding offers to direct Hollywood films in the aftermath of Swimming Pool. 'All they proposed to me were remakes, or erotic thrillers that would mean I was repeating myself.' And, he says while finally slipping off his sunglasses, 'I wouldn't have final cut.' It's a power thing, he adds. 'As a filmmaker, you have none in America. There, the director worships the producer. It is the director who helps the producer to win an Oscar.' He hoots, dismissively. This is a man who convinced his family to die on camera in the living room for him – fat chance anyone's going to be able to boss him around.
