To date, French actress Juliette Binoche has made only five English-language films. It's remarkable that she has achieved major international stardom having done so little work outside of France. But her success emerges as testament to a sublime talent and a face that looks like it was made for the silver screen. She has even won an Academy Award which she claims to keep “in a box with the plates.”

During the nineties, Binoche had a reputation for turning up her nose at the lure of Hollywood. There's probably no other actor who has turned down offers of roles from Steven Spielberg three times. When offered the lead in Jurassic Park she famously replied that she would only appear in the film if she could play a dinosaur. With Laura Dern in the role offered to Binoche, Jurassic Park went on to break box office records and for a while held the position of the highest-grossing film of all time.

After winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The English Patient in 1996, she seemed to change her tune somewhat, saying, “I know very little about American movies, which is why I hope I have the chance someday to make a Hollywood movie.” She also said, after the 2001 box office hit Chocolat, “Working in a second language is very difficult. I have made a conscious effort to improve my spoken English to allow me to work more in English films.”

Many of her fans will be delighted to hear that Binoche is finally making good on these promises. During the next year, she will release her sixth and seventh English-language films back-to-back. The first will be John Boorman’s Country of My Skull (also known as In My Country), in which Binoche plays a South African poet who falls in love with an American journalist played by Samual L Jackson. The romance plays out against the backdrop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings which try to heal the wounds caused by South Africa’s Apartheid policies.

After that comes Binoche’s first film set in America, The Bee Season. And this one really is a Hollywood movie -- made in California, by Californian co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, and co-starring Richard Gere. Binoche and Gere play parents so focused on their daughter’s success in spelling bees (children’s spelling championships which are popular in the USA) that they fail to see the rifts and dysfunctions growing within their family. Interestingly, the son of the family is played by Max Minghella, whose real-life father Anthony Minghella directed Binoche in The English Patient.

Whether Juliette Binoche’s latest two projects indicate a new willingness to work in English-language films, only time will tell. But as she very wisely once said, ‘Films are about human beings, not accents. The important thing is to be in a good movie, whether it is English, French or whatever.”