Carole Bouquet

Born: August 18 1957
Where: Neuilly-Sur-Seine, France

Bouquet made an arresting film debut sharing the title role of Luis Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire with Angela Molina.

She also joined the exclusive club whose members include Honor Blackman, Jane Seymour and Halle Berry - as a Bond Girl.

Bouquet originally enrolled at the Sorbonne at 15 with the intention of studying philosophy but later transferred to the Paris Conservatory where she received her acting training.

After the Bunuel film, Bouquet co-starred with Gerard Depardieu in Bertrand Blier's Buffet froid/Cold Cuts.

To British and American audiences she is perhaps best remembered as Bond girl Melina Havelock opposite Roger Moore's 007 in For Your Eyes Only.

She later admitted that she was so overcome during a love scene with Moore that she actually fainted.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Bouquet concentrated on feature work in her native France (in few films of note until Bertrand Blier's Too Beautiful for You).

The exception was a cameo role in the Francis Ford Coppola Life Without Zoe segment of the anthology film New York Stories.

Her most celebrated role of the 90s was as the character 'Carole Bouquet' in Michel Blanc's Dead Tired/Grosse fatigue.

Recent work for the Chanel No 5 model has included Blanc's winning farce Summer Things, based on the Joseph Connolly novel.

She is married to the French actor Gerard Depardieu.