Isabelle Huppert does nothing by halves. And she doesn’t, I think, care greatly for journalists. She expects them to ask stupid questions. Sitting before me in an airless room in the eaves of Paris’s Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, she is tiny, dressed entirely in black and more or less unsmiling.

Lily-skinned, red-haired, and with a fabulous curl in her upper lip, she’s appeared in more than 100 film and TV productions.