On a cold afternoon in Paris, a gleaming black Citroen pulls up outside the Hotel du Louvre. A driver dressed head to toe in black darts out and opens the door for a slim woman, also dressed in black, with auburn hair, large sunglasses and stylish boots.

Greeting a well-known filmmaker with a kiss, she marches through the revolving door, trailing a black coat behind her like a pet dog. Then after a quick discussion about the lift, she heads up a marble staircase.

She might play a cattle breeder living on a farm in her latest film but Isabelle Huppert certainly knows how to make a stylish entrance.

The hotel has hosted some famous guests in previous days as France launches the next year of films to international press, including fellow cinema legend Juliette Binoche and comic-turned-actor-director Dany Boon. But as the tizz of publicists awaiting her arrival indicates, Huppert is something special in France.

Fearless and intellectual as an actress, she has a Meryl Streep-like record at the Cesar awards, the country's Oscars. Just one win but 14 nominations over almost four decades up to Amour last year.

Upstairs, despite her tiny sparrow's frame, Huppert dominates the grandly named Suite Pissarro with a forthright personality and an easy laugh. While always more palely handsome than conventionally beautiful in person, she still has that rare quality of being radiant on screen.

"I'm lucky the camera likes me," she says. "The camera doesn't like everybody."

Directors also like her so much that at 61, Huppert is still in constant demand not just in France but around the world. As well as performing on stage with Cate Blanchett in The Maids in Sydney and New York, she has made films with directors from Germany, Norway, Denmark, Chile, Italy, South Korea, the Philippines and the US in just a few years.

Now she is back with Folies Bergere, a warm-hearted romance that is her second film with French director Marc Fitoussi.

Four years ago, she was free-spirited Babou, who was going through a crisis in the comic drama Copacabana. Now she is Brigitte, who is struggling with a mundane marriage in rural Normandy.

Stylish enough to wear a fur hat and natty tartan coat while feeding cattle, she is missing romance in her life with crusty husband Xavier, a prize-winning bull breeder (Billy Bob Thornton lookalike Jean-Pierre Darroussin).

That changes when, at a nearby home one night, she meets a dashing partygoer (Pio Marmai). His interest is enough for her to secretly follow him to Paris a few days later with an affair in mind.

While the film has a light touch, it is another sexually charged role for Huppert in a career full of them.

"She's not scared of anything," she says of Brigitte. "She goes from this young boy to this older man so she really explores all possibilities."

And – tres French – Brigitte explores these possibilities without a smidgen of guilt.

"It's an unexpected idea," Huppert says. "That's really the originality of the film. She has no guilt and she moves like a free spirit.

"Her life is not very adventurous. At some point, like most people in the world I have to say, she wants to put a little imaginary fantasy into her life. And she does it. That's what makes her really strong and rich and deep and what makes the film really humanist … In everybody there is this potential to almost be the artist of your own life."

Fitoussi says the clothes were key to Huppert working out how she wanted to play the role.

"There's the whole reading of the script but when it came to preparing for the movie, it was more about trying on the costumes: Should she wear heels? How high should they be? That's how she constructed the character."

He describes Huppert as a virtuoso for the wide range of characters she can play.

"She can take on these more cerebral roles in Michael Haneke's movies," he says in a reference to Amour and Time of the Wolf. "In my movies, she takes on lighter characters, but she's so at ease no matter what the role is. And she's always very curious about everything, just like a teenager might be."

French director Anne Fontaine, who shot the film Adoration and an Armani commercial in Australia recently, discovered that Naomi Watts, Nicole Kidman and Blanchett all consider Huppert an icon.

"For all of these big actresses, the standard is Isabelle Huppert," she says. "She can be everybody. She has the physicality like the girl next door. She's not beautiful but has this plasticity that can express so many things.

"And she's afraid of nothing. She can do extreme things. She's completely an actress in her commitment and the way she gets inside of her characters."

Binoche admires the way Huppert chooses non-mainstream films and takes inspiration from both foreign projects and regular returns to the stage.

"She has a mental force," she says. "She's quite intellectual. She reads a lot and she likes to know about things. In that way, she's powerful. And she goes out a lot. I see her a lot seeing plays and she loves seeing arts. She's constantly thirsty for new experiences. And in life, she's very alive and funny."

The youngest of five children growing up in Paris – her father was a safe maker and her mother an English teacher – Huppert became a noted actress while still in her teens. With bold choices and a willingness to take on dark and sexual roles, she has worked with many of Europe's most famous directors including Haneke, Fontaine, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Otto Preminger, Bertrand Blier, Andrzej Wajda, Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, the Taviani brothers and Catherine Breillat.

She has twice won best actress at Cannes – for Violette Noziere (1978) and The Piano Teacher (2001). Her other notable films include Loulou, Entre Nous, Madame Bovary, La Ceremonie and 8 Women in France; the ill-fated Heaven's Gate and I Heart Huckabees in the US; and Paul Cox's Cactus in Australia.

Discussing her films, it is Huppert who mentions the word transgressive, which is a fair description of some of her most troubling roles. She has been a sadomasochistic, self-mutilating piano teacher, for example, a Mother Superior who tries to take advantage of a young nun, an abortionist, a promiscuous mother who has an incestuous relationship with her son, a prostitute with a talent for role playing. Other actors do best as cops; she is happy playing murderers.

But as in Copacabana and Folies Bergere, she also plays ordinary women struggling with crises in lighter films.

"When you are an actress, you have to be a soldier and a princess," she once said. "You have to go to war and you have to wait. I like to do both."

But Huppert relishes roles that push her to emotional extremes.

"Sometimes it can be scary," she says. "Not all roles are transgressive. Some are more than others. But I like to have this freedom and this sense of like Virginia Woolf's A Room Of Your Own – it's your own territory and you just do it for yourself.

"It's important to preserve this kind of freedom within yourself and be able to challenge yourself and put yourself in certain situations where you go far. It's interesting."

Huppert says there are many elements to the intense commitment she brings to her performances.

"Commitment has a lot to do with intuition, with instinct, with energy, with something immediate that you don't really prepare.

"It has a lot to do with choices. Obviously choice is essential in the path you create for yourself – things that you do and things that you don't do. But once you've made choices, once you've established why you want to do something, you just do it.

"Acting is so much about being so much there at the moment you do it. It's this ability to be completely who you are when you do it."

Away from the set, she has no trouble separating from her characters.

"I've never been too fond of this cliché of the actor being so taken by a role and having a hard time getting rid of it," she says. "I tend to take things more lightly. Otherwise life would be a pure nightmare if each time you can't get unhooked from what you do.

"So from the very beginning, I took it as seriously as possible but almost like a routine, going from one role to the other. It doesn't prevent me from being completely committed to it as I do it. But once it's over, it's over."

Whether on screen or on stage, Huppert says she chooses roles largely because of the director.

"There's no material to be saved by a bad director's hand. It has all to do with what the director makes out of it and how he looks at you in it."

Coming to Australia for The Maids was a richer experience because of the challenge, she says.

"It's definitely a challenge for me to play in a different language so far away from my own country, with people that I didn't know before – neither Cate nor Benedict Andrews, the director.

"Even if you do a movie or a play in Paris, by definition it's always exploring a foreign world – imaginary but foreign. So when it really becomes a journey – geographically, culturally – it's very, very exciting."

Huppert seems more bemused than wounded by criticism from The New York Times' influential Ben Brantley who accused her of comically exaggerating her lines with an accent that rendered her "unintelligible for much of the time" in the play.

"I wasn't happy with his comment," she says with a laugh. "What else can I say? He's not my friend."

So you're not sending him a Christmas card?

"Exactly."

Criticism or not, Huppert continues working at a serious pace. She has just shot two more films in the US. In the drama The Valley Of Love, she and Gerard Depardieu play a couple who go to California's Death Valley after their son's death. And in Louder Than Bombs, she is a famous photographer whose death leaves her husband (Gabriel Byrne) and two sons grappling with a mystery.

As well as heading the jury at the Marrakech International Film Festival next month, she starts shooting the thriller Elle with Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, playing a businesswoman who turns the tables on a stalker.

Away from the screen and stage, Huppert has been married to producer-director Ronald Chammah for more than three decades and has three children, including actress Lolita Chammah.

Despite the style she showed arriving at the hotel, she can also pass for ordinary in daily life – even to other famous French actresses.

Juliette Binoche says she stopped a woman in the street to ask directions last Christmas Eve and was surprised to discover it was Huppert.

"We laughed," she says. "She was buying her Christmas shopping, as I was. It was so funny to see each other there."

Folies Bergere opens on December 11. The writer travelled to Paris as a guest of Unifrance.