Entertainment

An Oscar valentine

French actress Bérénice Bejo has a pretty great reason to be cheerful tonight: She’ll be at the Oscars as a Best Supporting Actress nominee for her first American film role, as starlet Peppy Miller in “The Artist.” But according to her husband, the film’s director, Michel Hazanavicius, she’d be in a good mood no matter what.

“The character is what I see in Bérénice in real life,” says Hazanavicius, a Best Director nominee, on the phone from Paris as he and Bejo prepped for their appearances at the Césars (the French Oscars) and then tonight’s Academy Awards, where the film is also in the running for Best Picture. “There’s something about her being really positive, the way she looks at people, there’s no bad feelings,” he says.

It’s no secret, then, why her character is named Peppy — and the protagonist’s name, George Valentin, seems a bit of a wink, too. The entire movie is a love letter from Hazanavicius to his wife. “When I first read the synopsis, I was really amazed and surprised at how the character was,” says Bejo. “I felt very lucky. It’s hard to find good characters, for a woman. I said to Michel, ‘You really know how to write for women!’ ”

Bejo has won over an American public understandably skeptical of the idea of paying to see a black-and-white silent film. Like her character, she’s become an overnight sensation: “Who’s That Girl?” read the headlines in the film. And people want to know who the real girl is, too.

Born in Argentina to a filmmaker dad and a lawyer mother, the 35-year-old Bejo was three when her family fled the country due to the oppressive dictatorship there. “Her father was making movies that could be subversive,” says Hazanavicius.

“They were kind of surrealistic movies, funny and strange,” Bejo recalls. “There was always a political meaning. And he did them with not so much money.”

The family relocated to Paris, where Bejo’s father moved away from filmmaking, but gave his two daughters an enduring love of movies. “He’s a great cinephile,” says Hazanavicius. “So Bérénice knows a lot about these [iconic] actresses. She was excited to work in that era.”

It’s not her first period piece: Bejo’s initial collaboration with Hazanavicius was the film on which they met, the 2006 spy spoof “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies,” shot to resemble the Sean Connery-era James Bond films, and starring “The Artist” lead Jean Dujardin.

“In ‘OSS,’ I wanted the perfect James Bond girl, but also someone who could bring humor,” says the director. “ We had a great time working together. Then after we made the movie, we were together [romantically] — we made a child!”

Several years after “Nest of Spies,” Hazanavicius began work on “The Artist.” Originally, he says, it didn’t take place in Hollywood or include Peppy.

“The idea was to set it in Berlin, and make a parallel between the arrival of sound and the arrival of the Nazis,” he says. “It was very dark. And I thought, I won’t take it that far. It’s not fair for the audience! I really felt I had to entertain people, to make it light. So I set the action in Hollywood, and tried to respect the Hollywood spirit, with a happy ending.”

The couple was living together by the time Hazanavicius was working on the screenplay, so Bejo dove into silent-film research alongside her husband. “Writing a story like that needs a lot of work — reading books about the period, watching a lot of movies, going to screenings at the French cinémathèque,” says the director. “Every time I finished a book, she grabbed it!”

Bejo, who gave birth to the couple’s second child just four months ago, has already been cast by her husband in another collaboration. “It’s going to be an adaptation of an American movie, ‘The Search’ [1948],” he says. “In the original, the lead was a [male] G.I., but I’m going to make it with her.”

Bejo’s star has risen so high that many wonder whether she’ll make the jump to a more Hollywood-centric career. She says her husband’s next movie will be a step in that direction: “I think there’s going to be a lot of English in it,” says the primarily French- and Spanish-speaking actress. She’s also slated to star in a French movie, “Populaire.” After that, she’s open to anything.

“If a character is right for me, and it’s an amazing movie and I love the script, I’ll be more than happy to do it,” she says. “I don’t really feel like I have to choose between [Hollywood and France], because even if I was living in LA, I’d still be shooting in Prague, or Canada or wherever.”

For now, she and her husband are savoring the moment — and trying to get a little sleep, as befits exhausted parents of an infant. “I keep in mind that I’m French, and I’ve been able to see how the American industry works. So when I get tired, I think, ‘OK, let’s have fun! Try to enjoy it! It’s a moment, and you have to take it.’ ”

Very Peppy of her, indeed.