But you know what? It’s actually a total drag, being young Hollywood’s go-to French Dream Girl. “I always get the girl who is French and liberated and stylised. I dream of playing a girl who is a tomboy, tough, in the mud; but no. Never.” De La Baume pouts, then laughs. “I’m lucky if someone offers me a part where I don’t have to smoke and drink wine in every scene.” It’s a hard life, right? But then, as de La Baume adds, “On the other hand, I do get to be grumpy and feisty and a pain in the ass, because that’s very French.”
De La Baume has strawberry-blond hair, long and vaguely unkempt, messily centre-parted in the Saint-Germain art student style. Her hazel eyes are flecked with so much gold, they look almost amber. She has incredible cheekbones and disarmingly normal teeth (Vanessa Paradis is the same). On a cool spring day, she wears a shaggy, 70s-style purple coat over a well-worn Alexander McQueen sweater with buttons missing at the cuffs, and faded J Brand jeans. On her hands there are a cluster of rings with motifs of lips or snakes. “It’s fun to wear something womanly and glamorous to a premiere, and to play the game,” she says. “But in real life I am quite tomboyish: I wear a lot of shirts, T-shirts, always boots.” Like every good Parisienne of this decade, her favourite label is Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent.
De La Baume has more about her than the picture captions on the social pages and men’s magazines would have you believe
In Listen Up Philip, the new film by 31-year-old Brooklyn film-making wonderkid Alex Ross Perry, de La Baume joins a heavyweight cast that includes Jason Schwartzman, Elisabeth Moss and Jonathan Pryce. It’s an angst-ridden New York comedy, very much in the Woody Allen tradition, down to the West Village bicycle rides set to jazz saxophone and self-obsessed men having verbose tantrums in paperback-lined apartments. De La Baume plays the gorgeous bluestocking, Yvette. “It’s a French-girl part, of course. He [Schwartzman] even says in the movie, ‘I always wanted a French girlfriend.’ But I liked that she was more than just the fantasy of a French woman. She’s romantic, but she’s also an achiever.”
As is de La Baume, when you scratch the surface. You know how one inevitably judges people, to a certain extent, by the people they are married to? Four years ago, de La Baume, now 30, married the musician and DJ Mark Ronson; before that, she starred in advertising campaigns for lingerie brand Agent Provocateur. So far, so predictably rock-star-marries-model. Well, put it like this: after spending a little time with de La Baume, my opinion of Ronson has risen noticeably. She’s got more about her than the picture captions on the social pages and men’s magazines would have you believe. (Mea culpa, for reading them.) First there is an acting career that began with French period drama The Princess Of Montpensier in 2010, and has included roles in One Day and Johnny English Reborn; then de La Baume makes up half, with her brother Alexandre, of the band Singtank, whose debut album gained a four-star review in this newspaper in 2012 (“a sherbert lemon of a debut album, sweet and tart in all the right places and measures”).
The trailer for de La Baume’s new film, Listen Up Philip.
Back, briefly, to those social pages. Of all the articles I read about de La Baume before meeting her, one particular headline stuck in my head for its pure silliness: “Socialite Hurt During Sail”, as reported in NY Post’s Page Six gossip column in January 2012. The piece referred to a minor back complaint suffered by Ronson’s mother, Ann Dexter-Jones, during a Mexican sailing holiday in the company of her son and daughter-in-law, and Joséphine’s parents, named in the item as “Baron and Baronne de La Baume”. Vanity Fair, meanwhile, included de La Baume and her “freight-inspection fortune” in a portfolio on heirs and heiresses. So, is she very, very posh? “Baron doesn’t mean anything in France. This is a republic. A title doesn’t mean anything here, and it hasn’t for years and years.” Her father is an ex-investment banker who owns a theatre, while her mother runs a charity. “It’s an old French family, but it’s not aristocratic. It’s a family of lawyers, really, nothing special. My parents are more intellectuals than anything, and they are interested in culture and ideas. They are very low-key people, not extravagant. They are in their 70s now, but they both still work. They spend their time going to the theatre, that sort of thing.”
One member of her family about whom de La Baume is happy to riff is her grandmother. It is a story so femme fatale, so fabulously mythic and cinematic, that it must be at least partly embellished, but it bears repeating. As de La Baume tells it, Suzanne Salmanowicz was a beautiful teenage bride when her husband was called up to fight at the beginning of the second world war. Pining for him, she joined the resistance, travelled to Africa in pursuit of him, and ended up on an army boat, which was torpedoed. “After two days swimming together, her husband sank in front of her, but she kept swimming. The next day, she got bitten by a shark. But – this is the funny part of the story – she was, how do you say, coquette? She liked to look nice, and she had had the coat lined and tailored to make it a better shape. And she always said that that had saved her ass, because the shark mostly bit her coat.” (A morality tale in defence of perfectly fitting clothes: so French.)
Stripe shirt, £465, by JW Anderson, from stylebop.com. Blazer, from a selection, 31philliplim.com. Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Photographer’s assistant: Linda Giezendanner. Hair: Nao Kawakami at Saint Luke. Makeup: Anthony Preel at Airport Agency. Photograph: Wendelin Spiess for the Guardian
Eventually saved by an English boat, Suzanne then fell in love with her commanding general, who was “married and a womaniser. And she was supposed to go on a spy mission to jump out of a plane next to a concentration camp, but right before, she found out she was pregnant – that was with my mum – so she didn’t go. Everyone on that mission was killed. So, my mum saved her life, in a way.” De La Baume wants to make a movie about her grandmother’s life, one day. I get the impression casting the main role will be relatively straightforward.
Joséphine is the third of her mother’s four children. “‘The first one from the second bed’ is what my mum says. Very French. So my parents were quite old when they had me. Now I can see that I was lucky. It was actually a very interesting childhood, but at the time I was like, for fuck’s sake, another classical music concert? Can’t you take me to, like, Michael Jackson for once?”
She and her younger brother Alexandre “started playing music as a way just to spend time together. And then I was going to acting school and he was working in movie production. Music was just something we did for fun.” But in London, Joséphine had “met some people in music, and stuff like that”, so they sent some music to producer Nellee Hooper, who ended up producing their first album; their second, Ceremonies, was released last year. Now music is as important to her as acting: “I can’t imagine doing one without the other.” When I ask what projects she is working on, she talks about playing the second album live this summer before getting to any upcoming movie projects (which include an Amanda Sthers film co-starring with Rossy de Palma and Rosanna Arquette).
Modelling, on the other hand, she is keen to distance herself from. “I never considered myself a model. I had started acting and doing music, and then I got hired for fashion jobs, so I always felt like I was being hired as Joséphine. Especially since they would have to resize everything.” (She is 5ft 4in, with splendid curves.) “I could do one day of modelling and live on that money while I made a film. That was what I liked about modelling, really.” And the Agent Provocateur brand, she says, is about more than just knickers. “Through the women they work with – from Kylie Minogue, who is so tiny, to Maggie Gyllenhaal – they celebrate different definitions of beauty. It’s about being comfortable with who you are, and that’s important. Am I a feminist? Of course! It would be ridiculous to be a woman and not to be a feminist. There is absolutely nothing negative about a word that means you care about other women and their rights. For as long as there is inequality in the world, it is really important that every woman is a feminist.”
De La Baume’s home with Ronson is in Notting Hill, but she has kept her flat in Paris (“It’s just, like, a basement”), because she is back and forth, most recently filming a French TV series, “a comedy, set in the secret service in the 60s”. Meanwhile, Ronson (who speaks French “a little… he tries”) lives between London and the US. He “helped a bit” on the second Singtank album, but “we didn’t physically work together because he worked from a studio in London and we were in Paris. That’s probably for the best, right?” Their life in London revolves around watching movies – “He is a huge, huge cinephile”, she says approvingly – and taking their dog, a black labrador/border collie cross (“We think, we don’t really know: she’s from the shelter”) for walks in Hyde Park.
Listen Up Philip is, in part, about somebody who leaves, about the impact of emotional unavailability on the people around Jason Schwartzman’s character. “You get to see what happens in the absence of someone, the impact of them not being there,” de La Baume says. As for her and Ronson’s own conflicting schedules, she says, “it just makes it exciting when we do have time at home – I mean, exciting for us, but so not exciting to talk about. We don’t go out, we don’t even go to the pub. All we do is watch films and hang out. I’m learning to cook. Just simple pleasures.” Like I say, so French.
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