French Class

Laurent Grevill was last seen in this country as Isabelle Adjani's world-roaming writer brother, Paul, in Camille Claudel. "Isabelle is very serious at work," he says, "but after a while we became almost like a real brother and sister." The son of a military doctor, and descended from French nobility and Viking conquerors, Grevill was "made in the desert" in Mauritania, and moved every two years with his family around Europe, Asia, and Africa. At sixteen he voyaged alone to France, where he enrolled first at a prestigious military academy, then at the Sorbonne, before turning to acting.

Grevill is a French doctor overseas—like his father—in his new film, Le Bal du Gouverneur, directed by Marie-France Pisier. The film is set in the fifties in New Caledonia—a thirty-hour flight from Paris—and the journey there satisfied Grevill's wanderlust, at least for the moment. But "after six months in one place," he says, "I want to move to the other end of the world."

LAURA JONES