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I grew up on Bette Davis movies, and Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe.

I long for the old days of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, stars who had real glamour and mystique. We only knew so much about their lives; the rest was a mystery.

I loved all those classic figures from the '30s and '40s... Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth. They had such glamour and style. I loved the movies of those times too - so much attention paid to details, lights, clothing, the way the studios would develop talent.

I never wanted to work in fashion. At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater! And I was crazy for the Hollywood of the 1950s: Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones. They were my idea of glamour - and Sylvie Vartan, the French singer.

I loved the movies and I wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe. I thought she was so glamorous and everyone seemed to love her. I wanted to be like that and I told everyone I would be the next Marilyn Monroe.

I loved all the other movies, and I loved all the other movie stars, but I was very aware of the fact that I didn't look like Marilyn Monroe - although I still wanted to be Marilyn Monroe. Then Josephine Baker popped up, and she wasn't the maid - she was the star of the show. To me, it was mind-blowing.

My father and Mary Pickford were the reigning stars of not just Hollywood but of the world. Well, to bear my father's name was hard enough, but to work in pictures to boot was pretty foolhardy. In fact, my father was totally against it. He thought I should be off getting a good education and go into some safe profession.

I was born in Paris in the mid-1960s, and by the time I was 12 I had started going to the movies by myself. Most of the movies of that period never appealed to me. I didn't like the 'naturalism,' the sad or the 'down-to-earth' characters. What I wanted from film was fantasy, dreams, funny situations, extravagant decor - and beautiful women.

I grew up with a tribe of amazing women, but certainly my mother and my godmother really modeled women as actors.

I grew up watching old black and white movies where Marlene Dietrich or Jean Harlow would go walking down some cobblestone street in ripped stockings and head into some smoky boite and sing for a pathetic living. That's so what I wanted to be.