French actress Elodie Bouchez has won critical praise and major awards for her role as the scruffy, kind-hearted gamine in Erick Zonca's The Dreamlife of Angels, but she nearly passed on the part. "I hesitated a lot before taking it," admits Bouchez, who with co-star Natacha Régnier shared the 1998 Best Actress prize both at Cannes and at the European Film Awards. Dreamlife is an astutely observed portrait of two young working-class women, Bouchez's upbeat Isa and Régnier's depressive, tumultuous Marie. "I felt Isa's character wasn't really defined whereas Marie was already fixed in Erick's head. In the script, Isa was kind and giving almost to a fault, but Marie was much more complex, much more interesting."

But Bouchez, 25, had been deeply impressed by Zonca's short films and decided to take a chance on the director's feature debut. To initiate the process of becoming Isa, she cut her long chestnut hair, an idea which so pleased Zonca that he asked her to crop it even shorter. Shedding her hair helped to unload her inhibitions, and together she and Zonca began to mold the character. She found a voice for Isa, a spirited gait, a way of holding a cigarette. "Erick was impulsive with me," she recalls. "He would imitate my gestures and mannerisms and make me laugh. He was always keeping things light."

Newly hot director Zonca is one of several important filmmakers with whom Bouchez has collaborated since she began acting at 16. A small part in Serge Gainsbourg's Stan the Flasher led to films by Patrice Leconte and Cédric Klapisch, among others. But it was her 1994 turn as the vivacious Maité in André Téchiné's acclaimed coming-of-age story Wild Reeds, that vaulted her to the front ranks of young French talent. That year she won the César, France's equivalent of the Oscar, as the most promising young actress.

Bouchez, who speaks excellent English, has already shot one English-language film (the forthcoming Lovers, by Jean-Marc Barr). She acknowledges that Hollywood has lately become a potent draw for French actresses like Emanuelle Béart (Mission: Impossible), Sophie Marceau (Braveheart), and Judith Godrèche (The Man in the Iron Mask). But Bouchez, who has 20 films to her credit, is not about to forsake Paris for L.A.

"I'm happy with the kind of work I've been able to do so far," she says. "If I could make the same kinds of films, the same kinds of choices, then I would have to consider it."