Huppert’s nauseating work with Haneke is nothing unusual. Now 48, this demure, classically trained Parisian has always opted for extreme and unusual roles during a career spanning more than 30 years and 70 films. At 24, she played a prostitute for Jean-Luc Godard in Sauve Qui Peut (la Vie); at 33, she was an abortionist who was the last French woman to be executed in Claude Chabrol’s Une Affaire de Femmes; while at 39 she starred as a self-declared nymphomaniac nun for the American film-maker Hal Hartley in Amateur.

Now, in her second collaboration with Haneke, Huppert plays a middle-aged, middle-class mother, Anna, who leads her two children through the countryside, in search of hope and survival after an unexplained apocalyptic disaster. As career choices go, Time of the Wolf is typical of Huppert; but only because she has again elected to embrace a director’s personal, horrifying vision.

Huppert turns heads when she arrives for our interview at a Paris hotel on the city’s Left Bank. While a porcelain complexion often marks her performances on screen — not least in Time of the Wolf — today she appears warmer, her skin freckly and matching the honey tones of her hair.

In France Huppert is a star, but for subtler qualities than, say, Catherine Deneuve or Juliette Binoche. In a country where intelligent and provocative cinema has always thrived, Huppert has worked with some of the most revered French auteurs of the past 30 years, including Godard, Chabrol, Bertrand Tavernier and Benoît Jacquot.

“I believe in directors,” Huppert says, explaining how her main motivation for choosing a film is always the film-maker behind it. In 2000, she notched up a sixth collaboration with Chabrol on Merci Pour le Chocolat.

“You can take a well- known subject, like a classical story, and it makes all the difference whether it is made by someone who has a vision or a film-maker who has no vision at all,” she says.

Huppert has a reputation for being difficult and impenetrable. But today she is accommodating and talkative. When, after nearly an hour of conversation, I suggest that we finish, she says simply: “You are the director. You decide.” Which suggests that her screen presence — often cold and sometimes malicious — has tarnished her public persona too.

François Ozon, who directed Huppert in his 2002 hit, 8 Women, says: “For the public she has the image of an intellectual who suffers behind an inscrutable face in dramatic and neurotic films. The Piano Teacher was the apotheosis of this. But I think people loved her as Augustine in 8 Women, which is a more extravagant part.

“Usually they don’t love Isabelle. They admire her, but she’s not popular in France. She’s respected, but not in the same way as Deneuve, who is very popular.”

Huppert is a serious actress, and when it comes to popular adulation this is, for some, a turn-off. Her contemporary, Isabelle Adjani — with whom she is often compared — has conquered hearts and minds with passionate roles and an exotic personal life. Huppert, meanwhile, has been married to the film-maker Ronald Chammah since 1982 and has three children. She still works in the theatre often, most recently in the late Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. She discusses acting with a striking intensity and readily agrees that, when choosing parts, she is attracted to extremes.

“I don’t think you should make movies just to describe typical situations,” Huppert argues. “That’s what makes movies exciting. I wouldn’t mind doing some lighter things, but we don’t have that many interesting light films here in France. Maybe it’s because we’re so cerebral. Most of the time, French films are more interesting when they are more dramatic.”

Haneke, an Austrian who usually makes films in French, is quickly becoming a regular collaborator. He first asked Huppert to work on his vicious 1997 film, Funny Games, but she refused. She then read Time of the Wolf in 1995, before embarking on The Piano Teacher, which won her the Best Actress award at Cannes in 2001.

Huppert’s most striking and noted attribute is her ability to transform her face into a blank canvas, subtly adapting to each new extreme emotion without ever slipping into melodrama. Nowhere is this more true than in The Piano Teacher, in which Haneke lingers on the expressionless eyes of Huppert’s viper of a character (a talented but repressed musician) as she seethes with anger and self-loathing.

“I think I’ll probably do another movie with Michael,” Huppert says. “He has a musical instinct of what is right and what is fake, you know? He has a great sense of the rhythm of a scene, which I think I have too. We really got along.”

Huppert is about to begin work on her next film, Ma Mère, a version of a Georges Bataille novel by a young French film-maker, Christophe Honoré. She will spend a month filming on the Canary Islands.

Huppert is also a confident actress in English, but her flirtation with American cinema has been occasional, beginning with Michael Cimino’s flawed Heaven’s Gate in 1980 and including her excellent turn as the troubled nun in Hartley’s Amateur. This year she has completed I Love Huckabee’s, working alongside Dustin Hoffman and Jude Law.

“I was supposed to be the dark side of the film,” Huppert explains, “but ultimately my role turned out to be as crazy as the others.”

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