It’s mid-afternoon and Marina Hands is flagging. On stage last night in Paris, in a Comédie-Française production of Clau-del’s Le Partage de Midi, she hopped over to London at an ungodly hour to spend a day discussing her new film, Lady Chatterley. If anything, it signifies a shift in her career. “I used to fit my film work around my stage work,” she says, “but it’s changing.”

Already this year she has made a fleeting appearance as Kristin Scott Thomas’s lover in the French hit thriller Tell No One. Now the 31-year-old has become yet another actress to take on the aristocratic heroine of D. H. Lawrence’s once infamous story. Little wonder she murmurs: “I’m holding onto this wave.”

In France, at least, this has already built to tidal-like proportions, where Lady Chatterley has become a sensation, winning five Césars – the French Oscar – including Best Film and Best Actress for Hands. Its success is all the more surprising when you consider that the film – which, directed by Pascale Ferran, is the first time Lawrence’s tale has been made by a woman – was shot on a piecemeal budget. “It nearly stopped every two weeks,” Hands reports. “We had the producer coming on the set and saying, ‘You’re not going to be paid for a month. Will you please carry on?’ ”

Where it differs, aside from the rather unusual novelty of seeing a film set in 1920s England populated by characters speaking French, is in Ferran’s adaptation. The “definitive” edition we all know as Lady Chatterley’s Lover was in fact the third version that Lawrence wrote. But Ferran’s film takes on the lesser-known second manuscript, published as John Thomas and Lady Jane. While the basic story remains the same, as Lady Chatterley becomes embroiled in an affair with her paralysed husband’s gamekeeper (here called Parkin – played by Jean-Louis Coulloc’h – and not Mellors), Hands sees the two as quite distinct. “They’re less sophisticated in our version, in the sense that they are not fighting against the social conditions of the times. It’s much more about their relationship and the emotional journey.”

While the film is rated 18 in the UK, it crucially resists turning Lawrence’s story into a lurid spectacle. Just compare it to Ken Russell’s 1993 version, where Sean Bean and Joely Richardson sexed it up as if they were characters in a Danielle Steel novel. “It’s not a fantasy, where Lady Chatterley is a sex goddess,” argues Hands.

Several weeks were spent in rehearsal with Coulloc’h in order that Hands was comfortable filming the sex scenes – and she’s just as at ease talking about them. “What was difficult was to make it . . . interesting!” she laughs. “She [Lady Chatterley] is discovering everything about herself and it takes time, like in real life.” Set to the slow-burning rhythms of the natural world, the aim for these lovers was obviously naturalism not titillation.

It doesn’t hurt that Hands is also half-English. She is the daughter of the French actress Ludmila Mikaël, while her father, the stage director Terry Hands, hails from Aldershot, Hampshire. “I was raised in France, and it’s obviously my first language, but at the same time I idealise England,” she says. “But I know that in France I’m not really a sort of French type, and in England I’m not British!” Although she trained at the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique, Hands exacerbated this duality by spending a year in London studying drama. Still, her parents were less than happy at her choice of career. “They were both quite worried,” she says. “But I really wanted to experience it myself.”

As it happens, it was her good friend, actor-turned-director Guillaume Canet, who cast her in Tell No One, who encouraged her to consider the profession. As teenagers, they were on the same horse riding team – “we were obsessed by it”, she says – and both considered turning pro until Canet had an accident and turned to acting. While Hands followed suit, she remained uncertain for years. “I questioned my desire all the time,” she says. Yet, after a triumphant appearance in Patrice Chéreau’s stage version of Racine’s Phèdre, as well as a role in Denys Arcand’s film The Barbarian Invasions, this gradually changed.

Now everyone wants her. Having taken a small part in Julian Schnabel’s forthcoming The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Hands is now readying herself to play Coco Chanel in a film that concerns the French fashion icon’s relationship with the composer Igor Stravinsky. “She supported him financially and they had a fascination for each other,” says Hands. Called Coco & Igor, bizarrely it is to be directed by The Exorcist’s William Friedkin, though this is just one of the talking points that has set the French media buzzing. “They all have a point of view [on her] and no one agrees,” she sighs. “I might go to Rome to rehearse, so I don’t feel the pressure!” It won’t make a difference: all eyes are now on Hands.

Lady Chatterley opens on Aug 24

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