The writer Ludwig Bemelmans once said, "Frenchwomen, I think, are rarely beautiful, but when they are, they hurt with their perfection." The second half of that generous insult epitomizes the ravishing French actress Eva Green, whose staggeringly under-clothed performance in Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 ode to Paris '68, The Dreamers, catapulted her to fame.

Green returns this November as Bond Girl Vesper Lynd in the most talked-about 007 movie in years, Casino Royale, and she does indeed look painfully perfect when she sashays into a script-lined conference room at her agent's office in London's West End. The 26-year-old Paris-born actress is clad in black, but the sun flashes off a fine gold chain on which are strung dozens of wafer-thin gold medallions, artfully scattered across her chest. Completing this fetching gypsy-rover look is her Border terrier, Griffin ("my husband," she jokes), who trots along at her heels.

Miraculously, Mademoiselle Green looks neither shaken nor stirred, despite having just spent the day strung up in the air in a metal cage at Pinewood Studios outside London, shooting a scene opposite Bond's new, fair-haired incarnation, Daniel Craig. "I am stuck in an elevator. It's quite claustrophobic," she says. "The cage is shaking and it's quite frightening because I am scared of heights. We are going underwater at the end of the week." She rolls her eyes and laughs at the absurdity of her standard day in the office. "A lot of the time you are not really acting. You are just running, and people are trying to kill you."

Green—who has an impeccable art-house pedigree thanks to her mother, Marlène Jobert, the star of Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin, Feminin—admits she has a tendency to get "obsessive" about her parts. When shooting began in Prague for Casino Royale, Green says, "I was very stressed out about not measuring up. I want to get it right and I'll repeat a phrase again and again. It has to sound perfect." Although the moviegoing public has always figured the Bond Girl as the ultimate blockbuster babe, Green—an avowed classical-music fan who recently bought a piano for her London flat—bridles at the term. Casino Royale, she points out, was actually Ian Fleming's first 007 story and Vesper—a complex, morally ambiguous heartbreaker who forever shaped James Bond—is a far cry from the stereotypical Bond bombshell. "I am Vesper Lynd—she's a human being. 'Bond Girl,' what does that mean? Somebody that he's going to . . . mmm-mm?"

So she won't be walking out of the sea singing "Underneath the Mango Tree," à la Ursula Andress in Dr. No? "I am not wearing any bikinis or anything like that," she says firmly. "Some people will always perceive me as the Bertolucci girl. They are like that. I have a lot of scripts sent to me with nudity in them, and I think, 'Oh yeah, it comes from The Dreamers.' I have to be careful now."

Nor does Green find much comfort in being told she is beautiful. Such compliments make her feel "quite paranoid," she says. Why? "When someone says, 'Oh my God, she is so beautiful,' I feel like the person is only talking about the exterior, like it's not real." Green pauses for a moment, her heart-shaped face perfectly punctuating the moment as she reconsiders her statement. Then, finally, she allows, "I am a Bond Girl. So maybe I am a little bit beautiful."—TOM SYKES