Christophe Lambert cuts a distinctly American-in-Paris figure as he strolls, Blackberry in hand, to the table where his bottle of Coke Zero and pack of Marlboros are lying in wait. Against the marble- floored, chandelier-lit lobby of Paris' Hotel Crillon, his choice of dress – jeans, trainers and black sweatshirt rolled up to the elbows – seems even more defiantly un-French. Who needs chic when you've got Hollywood?
But, comfortingly familiar though the aura is, this is not the Lambert who became a star in Highlander in 1986, all tousled blond mane and piercingly blue eyes. His hair is now sleek, kempt and grey. He peers through spectacles – his myopia is so severe he often has to act without being able to see very much.
If the changes in his appearance are marked, however, they are nothing compared to the revelation that is Lambert's latest professional move. The man who, for much of the 80s and 90s, was typecast as the hero of futuristic action movies – and saw his oeuvre increasingly peppered with straight-to-video duds and financial flops – has been given the kiss of approval by Claire Denis, one of France's most respected directors. He is no longer Christopher Lambert, star of blockbusters, critical savagings and gloriously bad accents; he is Christophe, scion of French cinema, and the arthouse is his home. "I wanted to do different movies. I wanted to do deeper movies," the 53-year-old actor says. "More human movies based on human feelings."
In Denis's latest film, the haunting White Material, Lambert plays a white farmer on an African coffee plantation who, in contrast to his stubbornly oblivious ex-wife (Isabelle Huppert), realises the family must abandon the land before civil war forces them out or kills them.
The world may marvel at this combination of actor and director, and no one is more surprised than Lambert himself. "I was very happy because, you know, coming from action thrillers, sci-fi and everything – in some ways I'm the kind of opposite actor that Claire would choose to be part of her movie," he says. She has never given him any indication of why she picked him, he says, telling him only that she had been watching him as an actor "for many, many years".
Therein, perhaps, lies the key to this cinematic coup. For while we in English language audiences know Lambert almost entirely as a bargain-bin action name, he more or less deserted that market around five years ago. And while the more unkind among us might suggest it was a move made more out of necessity than free will (films such as Fortress II, Adrenalin: Fear the Rush and three weak Highlander sequels had done little for his reputation), he is adamant it was a decision based purely on a desire to return to a European way of movie-making.
"That's what I needed to go back to – to do something really together. Not just being part of a factory or part of a machine," he says. "And that doesn't mean I'm not going to do an action movie again, or a thriller again, or a science fiction movie. It's just I needed as an actor to go back to smaller things, and after 60 or 70 movies at least you have bought yourself the luxury of being able to choose what you wanna do. That's all."
It didn't take Lambert long to choose Denis's script, co-written with last year's Goncourt prize-winner Marie Ndiaye, a French-Senegalese author whose words conjure up the same sensuality as the director's images. In White Material, his character, André, is a counter to the blindness of Huppert's Maria; André is a realist who knows the game is up. In his determination to acquiesce, he is a disorientating blend of heroism and – in Maria's eyes – cowardice. He believes the power of the film lies in its exploration of the legacy of colonisation. "For me, they're sitting on a ticking bomb because you cannot take everything from a country without giving something back," he says. "At some point you're bound to have a problem."
Lambert's performance has been praised by the French critics, and marks his greatest level of approval by the Parisian cinematic establishment since the mid-80s, when he starred opposite Catherine Deneuve in Elie Chouraqui's Paroles et Musique, and won a César for his role in Luc Besson's Subway. But, given that he all but abandoned the French movie scene for Hollywood, he is aware that many of his compatriots regard him with a certain snobbisme. Not that he cares. "I'm not in the loop of that type of cinema first of all, of any kind of cinema," he says. "I was like that when I was at theatre school. I wasn't part of a group, I was part of myself and that was a choice."
If he is to be an in-betweener, and never be fully integrated into either Hollywood or French cinema, at least Lambert was used to the life before he even became an actor. He was born in the US, the son of a French diplomat, and raised in Geneva, moving to Paris as a rebellious adolescent. Nowadays he lives "mostly on an airplane" and he can't stay anywhere longer than a few months. He has a "main residence" in Switzerland, a winery in Provence and a 16-year-old daughter – from his marriage to 1980s screen siren Diane Lane – in Los Angeles. To complete the exotic blend, for the past three-and-a-half years he has been in a relationship with one of France's best-loved actors, Sophie Marceau. (She directed and appeared alongside him in the 2007 thriller La Disparue de Deauville, and romance blossomed afterwards.)
It is in Europe, then, that he now spends most of his time, and, while English-speaking audiences may reel at his new, quasi-cerebral image, he insists little has changed. "I was always trying, even in pure action movies, to find what was sensitive about the character more than the pure action," he says. "When I read Highlander, what interested me was the romance, the pain that this guy was carrying, not being able to die and looking around him at all the people he loved going before him."
Ah, Highlander. Twenty-four years after it opened (and a decade after it bid a final farewell with Endgame, which itself came after the execrable Highlander II: The Quickening and the only marginally better Highlander III: The Final Dimension), Lambert is still greeted in the street as his character, Connor MacLeod. And, while he has no plans to go back – "four was enough" – he says the possibility of his appearing as a cameo (a "wink to the audience") in a mooted remake has been discussed. Highlander, he says, was "ahead of its time" visually, and is surviving by being passed down through the generations. Ever loyal to the film and its legendary Queen soundtrack, he even went to see We Will Rock You in London last year.
Does it irritate him that any interview he does or any conversation he has with a fan inevitably comes back to a part he first played over two decades ago? Does he feel haunted? "No," he says, firmly. "It's like, would people like Clint Eastwood be upset because they talk about Dirty Harry? Or Mel Gibson because they talk about Mad Max or Harrison Ford because they talk about Indiana Jones? I think in some ways it's good to have at least one thing for which you could be really immortal, you know?"
White Material is released on 2 July.
Trash trumpers: When action stars go legit
Sylvester Stallone in Cop Land
Stallone made his name pounding flesh in Rocky in 1976, and kicking ass in 1982's First Blood, but he's always yearned to be something more than a gormless action-jackson. Hence his regular appearances in furrowed-brow dramas such as FIST, and lame comedies such as Stop or My Mom Will Shoot. Cop Land, in which he plays the hearing-impaired sheriff of a small town home to corrupt New York cops, is easily his finest performance. Sadly, he's unlikely to be remembered for it.
Jean Claude Van Damme in JCVD
A karate black belt with a sideline in ballet, the "muscles from Brussels" ploughed a single-minded furrow in the 80s and 90s: titles include Bloodsport, Kickboxer and Street Fighter. He tried to raise his game in 1994 with the self-explanatory fantasy Timecop, but finally went all post-modern two years back with JCVD, an alarmingly self-referential film about an action star whose career is in ruins and who tells the audience at length about his drug and relationship problems.
Dolph Lundgren in Johnny Mnemonic
Lundgren was an "amphibious marine" in the Swedish military; that makes him a million times harder than a cream-puff like Schwarzenegger, and perfect for inheriting all the lumbering thug roles Arnie was too busy to do after T2. Hence his He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Showdown in Little Tokyo and Universal Soldier. But even Dolph couldn't resist the call of cutting-edge hipness, playing a nasty opposite Keanu Reeves in the film of William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic.