Passions of an ingenue who never grows old: Famous at 17, dangerously attractive at 61, Leslie Caron discusses lovers and husbands with Angela Lambert

LESLIE CARON erupts on to the screen as a dangerously attractive potential mother-in-law, wearing a yellow jacket, laughing. She plays the only animated and convincing character in Damage. The film, based on Josephine Hart's first novel, the tale of an encounter between a Tory MP and his son's prospective wife; a tale of obsessional love and passion. Leslie Caron has known plenty of both.

First, however, she knew success. Trained as a dancer, she became an actress. In the Fifties and Sixties, her face determined the look of a million teenagers and haunted the dreams of a million men. As the ingenue in Gigi she caught the heart-strings; in An American in Paris she danced with, and was a match for, Gene Kelly. She was gamine and captivating, but with a European sophistication beside which synthetic Hollywood starlets paled into banality. She captivated Peter Hall, whose first wife she was and whose subsequent wives have all resembled her. ('It's very flattering.') She captivated Warren Beatty, with whom she had a passionate love affair. ('Didn't everyone?' she asks serenely.)

Her mother was American, her father French. She was, as the French put it, bien elevee, which means well- brought up but also implies well-bred. 'I was protected and isolated and very much aware of it as an adolescent. I was famous by the time I was 17 because a ballet called La Rencontre was done for me by Lichine - the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx - and without any pride I must say that it made me famous overnight. I found it perfectly normal. At that age nothing surprises you in the least.'

In 1951 she appeared in her first film, An American in Paris, with Kelly, who had seen her with the Ballet des Champs Elysees in Paris. The film won that year's Academy Award for best picture. Caron and another young actress shared and swapped ingenue roles for more than a decade. That other actress was Audrey Hepburn, and when I arrived for this interview, Caron had just received the news of her death.

'I was so shocked when I heard. I can't imagine Audrey having a cancer and I can't get used to the idea that she's no longer there. I always saw her as a winner. People disappear who seem so essential to the stuff of life - Nureyev last week and now Audrey. And every time you think, my goodness, we are all so vulnerable] Yet inside, I'm still a young girl.' She proves it, unconsciously, as she demonstrates the way Nureyev danced, his humanity, with youthful, melting gestures of her arms and hands.

'We had parallel careers, Audrey and I: they would hire either one of us. She did Gigi on stage and I did the film and in the stills we could almost be taken for each other. She was reserved but very charming. We were in competition for the same Oscar in 1953: the year she won it for Roman Holiday, I was in for Lili. We met soon afterwards at Givenchy's and talked. I was in a sort of melancholy state because MGM had locked me into a contract and I was suffering very much in my exile from France, whereas she was freelance and seemed able to conquer everything in her professional and private life. I saw her in Jean Giraudoux's Ondine in 1954 on Broadway, and in 1961 I played the role in London.'

In 1956 Caron escaped from Hollywood, divorced her first husband ('His mother was French, like mine; I was homesick. It was a baby marriage.') and fled to England to star in a stage version of Gigi for a brilliant young director called Peter Hall. That same year they married.

'When I met Peter I was fascinated by his talent. He was not a well-known figure yet: he was a director at the Arts Club, earning pounds 30 a week] But it was a big passion on both our parts and it was a wonderful marriage. The painful thing was that he didn't include me in his work at all. There was perhaps some rivalry on his part there; but Peter came from a very modest background in which it was shocking for women to work. That was also a generally accepted notion in England in those days.' Between Gigi and Ondine five years later she was discouraged from acting and (things were different then) relegated to being Mrs Hall, wife of Peter and mother of first Christopher and then Jennifer.

Caron, trained to work from earliest childhood, fumed and fretted against this restriction. In the apricot-coloured hallway of her Paris flat there hangs, among many others, a nave painting of a smart London square. Tall, narrow houses loom claustrophobically on three sides and in the middle a giant baby sits smugly in a pram. It is striking, but a little alarming. When I ask about it she says: 'Oh, I painted that] It's Montpelier Square, where I lived when I was married to Peter Hall.

'Nowadays of course things are very different. I see my son sharing all the household burdens with his wife: he cooks, washes the dishes, changes nappies.' She adds, with peals of laughter: 'And so does Peter Hall now] In my day he didn't even know where the kitchen was] He and Nicky (Hall's fourth wife) have just had a baby, Emma. That upset my children a bit, I think . . . after all, Jenny's now 32. Anyway, so a marvellous marriage became frustrating, little by little. Finally Peter asked me to let go my agent, and that's when I really felt locked in.

'Then I was asked by Rene Clair to do a film in Paris, which distressed Peter extremely. I went nevertheless - you can't refuse a film with Rene Clair - and I said, if you stop me expressing myself you might as well cut my arms and legs off. It's the same thing. It's death. After that Peter did ask me to act in Ondine, in 1961, and I was so proud to be acting with the RSC.'

As it happens I remember seeing that production, and I also remember seeing Caron leave with Warren Beatty afterwards. They made an electrically beautiful and sexy couple. I ask her about Beatty: did that relationship precipitate the end of her marriage with Hall? Yes, she admits, it did: but the frustration of being a non-working wife had already done a lot of damage. 'So you ended the marriage?' I ask. She gives a little sigh and a little, helpless wave of her upturned hand. 'No; he attacked me, because . . . dear me, all this is very difficult . . . the situation is very difficult . . . Yes, I was having an affair with Warren: wasn't everyone?'

What made Beatty so irresistible? 'He was - oh, I don't want to talk about it]' And, having already said that she smokes only under stress, she lights a cigarette and blows the smoke out fiercely as though to repudiate Peter Hall, Warren Beatty and me. She disappears into the kitchen to make some coffee.

In 1965 she was divorced from Hall and, leaving her children in England with him, followed Beatty to Hollywood and lived with him there for two years. But that affair, like all the others until Annette Bening finally collared him last year, did not lead to marriage. Instead, in 1969 she married an American producer six years younger than herself called Michael Laughlin. She went back to work as an actress, chiefly in films: none as good as those from her astonishing debut years in the Fifties. Who now would care to remember Father Goose or A Very Special Favour or Promise Her Anything? Not even, I suspect, Caron herself. At any rate, she doesn't talk about them.

She was happy with Laughlin for most of their seven-year marriage: 'He had wonderful ideas, he was full of fun and he loved glamour above all.' She laces her hands behind her head, gazing into space. 'But Hollywood didn't suit me. I never felt I had a grasp on it. I was not comfortable.' This period came to an end when Laughlin suggested they move to Europe. 'But he soon realised he was a foreigner here. He went back to work in Hollywood - and, well, you know what men are: soon there was a new lady in his life and, to be honest, a new man in mine, so that was it]'

We have been drinking strong black coffee out of tiny, colourful art deco cups. They are rare and individual, like everything in the spacious second floor apartment behind the Musee d'Orsay in which she has lived for the last 15 years. Its walls are dove grey, the curtains heavy silk, extravagantly white, but the sofa and armchairs, originally upholstered in brilliant Techicolored silk, are hidden behind taupe-pink loose covers. The floorboards, dovetailing in herring-bone diagonals, are sanded and varnished, scattered with heavy Persian rugs. Two sets of French windows open on to a balcony overlooking the busy street: a ceaseless cavalcade of Parisian life.

The walls and shelves display her paintings, signed photographs of Truffaut and Arletty, a portrait of Christopher Isherwood, and pictures of her children when young. There are two marble and mirrored fireplaces. A computer stands on her glass dining table. She writes fiction on it, but for now the screen is covered with details of building estimates.

Caron has spent most of the last few months far away from this elegant apartment, standing in jeans and Wellington boots in the middle of a building site at Villeneuve, a small provincial town in Burgundy. This is the location of her latest passion, and like all her passions it absorbs her utterly. Five years ago she and her son spotted a group of charming but dilapidated old houses beside a bridge over the river Yonne and - to cut a long story short - they have now bought them all and are painstakingly renovating them, with Caron herself as foreman/builder.

'I order the sand and cement and nails and drive the truck that collects all the materials. I do happen to like houses, (an understatement) and I couldn't bear to see these four crumble. I had no idea it was going to be such an enormous endeavour.'

While she enjoys the collaboration with her son, a banker friend of his, and the architect on this project, she concedes that she misses the intimacy of a good relationship. But passion, as she knows well, can hit you over the head like a bag of cement, any time, out of nowhere. I sense that she would welcome it.

'One always needs a protector, it seems. The trouble with marriage is that you have to keep growing in life - you go through a mysterious pattern in order to develop as a human being, and it's very difficult to achieve this alongside someone else: this synchronicity. I don't have a partner and I miss the sharing. I find it hard to be on my own, but I made a deliberate decision to learn to stand on my own feet. Now, it's been so long since I lived with someone that I've almost forgotten what it's like.' She laughs, freely, genuinely. She doesn't assume a facade for this interview, but comes over as frank and bien dans sa peau, as the French say: perfectly at ease with her age and stage.

The captivating ingenue of the Fifties and Sixties is now 61, and makes no bones about it. Since she looks a good 20 years younger, admitting her age is more like boasting than confessing. When I suggest that ageing well is a matter of good genes and good discipline she murmurs in her beguiling bi- lingual accent; 'No. A good doctor, I think.' Certainly she glows with health and vitality. She still works out at the barre first thing every morning - a legacy of years of training as a ballet dancer - and has a supple, slender figure. 'It does get more difficult but never mind: I need energy for what I do. I don't ever want to slump in a chair; I don't ever want to be ill. I want to go on doing things until my last breath.'

The photographer has finished setting up his tripod on the balcony. He seats her directly in front of the open french windows, and even under the harsh noon light her face looks smooth and taut. She is composed and unself- conscious, responding to his requests with cool professionalism; lifting her chin, turning her head or her eyes. She has little to fear from the camera's scrutiny, her features unspoilt by vanity, petulance or self-indulgence.

She hurls herself enthusiastically into new projects. Two years ago she learnt German for her part in a stage production of Grand Hotel. For that she had to go back on her toes: literally, not just figuratively. At 59 she danced en pointe. 'That's it] Good . . . perfect . . . lovely]' says the photographer.

Hunter Davies will be back next week.

(Photograph omitted)