It is 10am on a foggy Saturday morning in Brussels, on a street coloured only by gaudy neon signs offering sex toys, porn films, Eurotrash CDs and female flesh for hire. It is not star territory. It certainly isn’t the sort of area where you would expect to find a Chanel model and girlfriend of a Hollywood star. Yet, somehow, meeting Vanessa Paradis in such insalubrious surroundings isn’t one bit odd.
After all, this is the woman who, at the age of 15, became a male fantasy overnight with her Lolita-like pop song Joe le Taxi. The schoolgirl who had “whore” graffitied on her home when she appeared, as she admits, in “short skirts that were hardly there”. The young girl who was taken under the wing of the notorious Serge Gainsbourg, to be tutored in the art of Jane Birkinesque love songs. The actress who bared all in her César-winning performance of Noce Blanche. And finally, and this is the last time we heard from her, the seductress who supposedly “stole” Johnny Depp from Kate Moss. A clean-living Gwyneth Paltrow type she isn’t.
Or rather, wasn’t. “Unless you’re a tomboy, every 14-year-old wants to be a woman,” Paradis, now 31, protests, dragging on the first of several black roll-up cigarettes. “I wore make-up and very short clothes — almost no clothes — because I wanted to be sexy, and be a woman. I wanted to be faster than life. But I don’t regret it. I’m not ashamed of it at all.” And today? “Being older, and especially being a mother, I don’t think about it. I suppose because I am a satisfied woman now, I don’t have to try to be anything else. My life is so beautiful, and I have everything I want and need.”
“Everything” Paradis needs is not only her two children, Lily-Rose, nearly 5, and Jack, 2, her second film in a year, a starring role in the new Chanel campaign (the first was for Coco perfume 13 years ago, in which she posed in a birdcage) and couture dresses given to her by the designer Karl Lagerfeld, but a partner millions of women fantasise about — Johnny Depp.
Paradis is in Brussels, playing the part of a prostitute in the French director Serge Frydman’s new film, My Angel. It means that she and Depp are apart “for the first time in years”, and she says she misses him every day. “What is it about him I love? Everything. Everything,” she whispers, half American schoolgirl, half French seductress, her pale-green eyes misting over. “It would be silly to tell you how smart and funny and brilliant and special and beautiful he is. I mean, it is all this, but it is beyond that. I don’t know... He is just the one. Before I even met him, I knew. I had been in love with him for quite a while.”
Since they have had children, she explains, they try to be together almost constantly — whether that is at their villa near St Tropez or at home in LA. “We can’t be apart for long,” she says. “Luckily for me, I have spent my life travelling, so I am used to going wherever Johnny is, whether it’s England, Prague, Mexico or Paris. And the kids like it, too. I hope it will make them broad-minded and open. As long as we have everything they need — which is a lot, like about 40 bags — we have as normal a life as possible.”
Not that their life is normal, she is quick to point out, with “so much privilege in our life and many, many more material possessions than we need”. But, she adds, “You learn that what matters is the friends who surround you wherever you are. To us, a good life is about having good people around you, people you love, who care for you. That’s what life and home and family is about. And that’s what we’ve got.”
When the pair are not filming, she says, they spend their time at home in France, playing in the garden, walking on the beach, like any other family. “In LA, it’s doing things that normal mums do — like going to the kids’ gym with them.” Jack (whose umbilical cord was cut by his father) is a real boy, Paradis says. “One minute, he wants to be a pirate, like his dad (who starred in Pirates of the Caribbean). The next, he wants to be a cowboy.”
Lily-Rose, by contrast, is a fashion babe; she even has her own Chanel handbag. “She is already such a lady, such a girlie girl,” says Paradis. “So, when I started modelling the Chanel bags, I had to ask for a little pink one for her, which she loves. I mean, she was rocking perfectly in my Chanel pumps when she was two. She is so ready to be a woman, this one.”
Prior to fatherhood, Depp was known as a wild boy, drinking in his Viper Room club in LA and partying heavily for four years with Kate Moss. Having children with Paradis has clearly calmed him down. “Children bring out the best in you,” she says. “They teach you things in your life, they show you the real beauty of life and love, and everything that is open and honest and direct and pure.” They’d both love more children, she says; they’re what she’s been “waiting for from such a young age. I don’t know how many more: one, maybe two. I don’t know if I can stop. I just love having babies”.
When asked if she worries about Depp falling for other women (after all, he met Paradis when he was seeing Kate Moss), she just shrugs her shoulders. “There are lots of pretty women out there and everyone, whether they are a plumber or a lawyer, has occasions to be unfaithful. He is confronted by people every day who, you know, are prettier than me. Or funnier than me. Whatever. You know, I don’t care. I’m his best friend. And I guess that being away and seeing other people just brings us closer together. Because we know we’ve got the best to come — when we’re together again at home.”
Getting married isn’t a priority either, she stresses. “We’ve never said we don’t want to get married, but we’re neither opposed to it nor excited about it. You know, we might do it for the kids one day. But we are more than married: we have two children. It’s not like we need to.”
They haven’t managed to work together, although they came close with Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which was axed when the lead actor fell ill. “Neither of us knows whether it would work,” says Paradis. “My worry is keeping a straight face in front of him; he makes me laugh all the time. So trying to be serious, to give him a look without having to giggle — honestly, I don’t know if I could do that.”
In the meantime, she’s working on her seventh film, composing songs for her seventh album (with three fingers on the piano, or the guitar when she’s travelling) and feeling slightly nervous about the public’s reaction to the posters of her modelling the new Ligne Cambon handbags in Chanel’s shop windows in London. “I hope they don’t paint a Hitler moustache on,” she giggles, remembering the time when women shouted “Whore!” at her in the street. “I suppose you can’t be loved by everybody, and when you’re in the public eye, reactions are excessive. Fortunately, that was long ago.”
Besides, she adds, pulling her wild blonde hair into a scraggy chignon, being a busy mother, she doesn’t have time for gossip. “My life is away from silly magazines, which are good for one thing — making fires.” With that, she grins, revealing her famously gappy teeth, collects her black Rizlas and tobacco, and is off — back to her children. And next week, lucky woman, to Johnny Depp.
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