French actress Carole Bouquet has never fully come to terms with her beauty, says Robert Chalmers in the London Independent. The one-time “Bond girl” and star of such films as That Obscure Object of Desire, now 50, was raised by a distant, authoritarian father whom Bouquet could never talk to about intimate matters. “I was never taught what femininity was. I learned it—or rather—I invented it, on my own,” she said. She hated the way men stared at her, and at 15, she cut her own face with scissors. “I tried to stop people looking at me by hurting myself. I gave myself scars; then they looked at me twice as much because they thought I was crazy.” Later, as her career took off, she was haunted by the fear that she landed parts because of her looks, not her talent. “I kept asking myself, Why do I deserve this part?” Such insecurity may explain her attraction to difficult and self-destructive men. Her first husband was the producer Jean-Pierre Rassam, who struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism. He died of an overdose in 1985. She later took up with Gérard Depardieu, who has had substance-abuse problems of his own. “These men, they are ogres. Life doesn’t satisfy them. Excess barely satisfies them,” she said. “People who have exercised great power, then lost it—I find them compelling.”
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