Want to play La Parisienne? Here's how

Paris

FRANCE may have gone back into lockdown last month, but it still has an international ambassador on small screens everywhere thanks to actress Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, aka Sylvie Grateau in the Netflix series Emily in Paris.

As the head of a luxury marketing agency who overdresses, smokes, mocks political correctness and oozes meanness, she is the extreme version of the "Parisienne", disseminating style and scorn in equal measure.

Although she inhabits the role so completely that it has made her into a star at 57, Ms Leroy-Beaulieu has some very definite feelings about the myth of what she calls "the French bitch": what is fact, what is fiction and what is worth considering.

It is a useful reminder that, while stereotypes are easy to sell - the French have described the series as a ragout of ridiculous clichés - the more complicated reality is often better.

"It's funny, because the series is not meant to be real," she said, over lunch at Cyril Lignac's Le Bar des Prés, one of her favourite neighbourhood bistros.

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"It's what Americans expect of Paris. The French are good at mocking other people but don't have a sense of humour about themselves."

In real life, for example, Ms Leroy-Beaulieu's wardrobe does not resemble that of Sylvie, who wears stilettos, pencil skirts and cleavage-revealing outfits even in the office, and rails against tourists in "cargo pants".

"I loved being overdressed in Emily, because I don't do it in real life," she said, ordering raw fish, tapioca pudding and green tea, and offering her white American Vintage long-sleeved V-necked knit shirt, Uniqlo jeans, Rick Owens black blazer and Tod's rubber-bottomed lace-up boots as a case in point.

She carried a suede Avril Gau maxi bag and a tailored chocolate brown Rick Owens coat and arrived on a vintage Gitane bicycle (she also rides a Vespa scooter).

"I wouldn't wear those heels on Paris sidewalks," she said, laughing, of Sylvie's strappy open-toed stilettos. "But it doesn't matter. The idea was to push all the fashion higher than real."

Ms Leroy-Beaulieu, who grew up in Rome, moved to Paris as a teenager when her parents divorced. She drew inspiration for Sylvie from her mother, who had been a designer of jewelrley, handbags, scarves and knitwear for Dior and who died earlier this year. (Ms Leroy-Beaulieu's father was a well-known French actor who made his career in Italy).

In the series, Sylvie sways as she walks, bending her elbows and dropping her hands.

"My mother was nonchalant, incredibly elegant, provocative, a little mean on the side," Ms Leroy-Beaulieu said. "She was always holding a cigarette. The hand thing - I got it from her."

She also wore some of the jewellery her mother designed: cuff bracelets; a necklace with a long silver chain and an amethyst pendant; and a large gold brooch in the shape of an angel.

Her mother's jewellery, her good luck charms

"They are my good luck charms," she said. "They say, 'Mom is here to protect me.' "

As a teenager, however, they did not protect her from ridicule when she moved to Paris. Her high school classmates and teachers mocked her because she made mistakes in formal written French dictations, sometimes calling her ethnic slurs.

"It was public, it was humiliating, it was horrible," she said. "I hated the French. I hated Parisians."

In Emily in Paris, Sylvie calls Emily la plouc - "the hick" - to her face. Ms Leroy-Beaulieu said: "I was like la plouc. Yes, there really are Parisians as mean as Sylvie."

She worked in a few commercials to earn pocket money as a teenager, spent two years in acting school and got bit parts in film in her early 20s.

Her role as the single mother in the 1985 comedy Trois Hommes et un Couffin, a runaway hit in France, earned her a César nomination for most promising actress.

The film was panned by American critics but was successfully remade by Disney in English as Three Men and a Baby.

Over the years, she has played roles as varied as Charlotte Corday (Marat's assassin during the French Revolution), a drug addict, a Russian aristocrat, a psychopathic doctor turned police officer, and a Polish-Jewish émigré in World War II France.

As with many other actresses, the older Ms Leroy-Beaulieu got, the fewer the roles.

"Let's be honest," she said. "I entered a tunnel in my career. I've never related to my age in a concrete way, but there's a moment in life that for the outside world, things change.

A break came when director and screenwriter Cédric Klapisch cast her in a small but key role in Call My Agent!, a French television series about four top film industry agents struggling to keep their business afloat, and their star clients content.

Ms Leroy-Beaulieu plays the beautiful ambitious wife of Mathias Barneville, the most senior agent, who betrays her twice before she leaves him for good.

She landed the role of Sylvie in Emily in Paris by chance. Darren Star, the creator of Emily in Paris, asked Juliette Ménager, an international casting agent, to find an actress to play Sylvie - the most challenging part of all the French roles Ménager had to cast. "I told her, 'Listen Philippine, you're too old,' " Ms Ménager said. "But energy-wise you don't look your age, so why don't we try?' "

The role was intended for a woman between 35 and 45, but Ms LeRoy-Beaulieu was undaunted. "I said to myself, 'I know this woman so well. I can see her right away,' " she said.

Something wild, like a panther

To prepare for the part, she watched films with Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbra Streisand. "There was something wild, like a panther, in them that I liked for Sylvie," she said.

She brought Sylvie's discipline and character to the set, so she and Lily Collins, the Emily of the title and Sylvie's younger nemesis, kept their distance.

"We stayed in our roles," Ms Leroy-Beaulieu said. "She was with the youngsters having fun. I was the lone wolf, the French bitch-witch fuelling my whole Sylvie mood."

William Abadie, who plays a perfumer-client in the series who is also Sylvie's married lover, described that distancing as difficult.

"To stay in character means you have to be willing to suffer the consequences," he said. "People who came onto the set who didn't know her before. I'm not sure they warmed up to her so much."

Like Sylvie, Ms Leroy-Beaulieu does not consider herself a feminist, which many Frenchwomen, according to polls over the years, equate with a negation of classic femininity.

"I'm not at war with men," she said. "That's the most ridiculous idea in the world. In that respect I cannot identify with feminism. I like it when men try to seduce. Some do it nicely, some don't. At least you have a choice." NYTIMES