I would absolutely love to work with them.”Janssen became a model at 18 “As a child I wanted to be a vet or a pilot. And there’s a childlike enthusiasm about her admiration for Daniel Day Lewis: “He is my favourite actor of all time, and I love the films he’s done with Jim Sheridan – The Boxer, In the Name of the Father and My Left Foot. “She finds out her husband’s been beating the kid and tries to get him out of the country; she’s a mess I’m attracted to inconsistency and flaws in character. We had a half a million-dollar budget and you really rough it by doing films like that, but it was fantastic.”Janssen is not one of those actresses who spout fake protestations about being more interested in the “work” than fame or success.

It is patently obvious that “the work” is the only thing that interests her. While she is happy enough to discuss X-Men and Bond, she prefers talking about filmmakers: “Jane Campion [The Piano] is one of my biggest inspirations,” she says, reeling off her other favourites: “Terrence Malick, Stanley Kubrick, Fran?s Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard – I love the whole New Wave of French filmmakers In America, I loved the film Little Miss Sunshine It was so funny and different,” she says. “I grew up in Holland, which is very different from America because we don’t pay that much attention to looks,” she says. “It’s never been something I’ve put any emphasis on.”Over the years, she has proved that her talents extend beyond villains and superheroes.

She played a psychologist opposite Robert De Niro in Hide and Seek, gave a convincing performance as a journalist in the romantic comedy Love and Sex with Jon Favreau and appeared in Woody Allen’s Celebrity. Yet despite her obvious talent (and intelligence) she has become identified with a specific kind of sexualised superhero. She’s never deliberately fostered that image though; on the contrary, she’s done her best to counter it. “I just did three independent films in a row and lost money on all of them, but I don’t care,” says Janssen. She plays a recently widowed woman with two adopted children in The Treatment, a drama with Ian Holm, directed by Oren Rudovsky “It’s a great Woody Allen type of movie,” she says. “We shot it in New York for absolutely no money.” She stars opposite Liev Schreiber and Winona Ryder in The Ten and plays a mother fighting for custody of her 10-year-old son in Turn The River.

Long-limbed and willowy, she is a striking presence, with sculpted, symmetrical features But she looks serious and rarely smiles. I don’t want to be typecast, that’s my big mission in life and it makes it a harder path in this business for me,” she says.
At 41, she continues to be named among “the world’s sexiest women”, but refer to her as a sex symbol and there is a disdainful grimace “I don’t see myself that way,” she says “I don’t look in the mirror and think I’m beautiful I never have and I never will. You walk into a room and people instantly judge you on the way we look; that’s human nature, unfortunately And the way I look is definitely a double-edged sword. I’ve been lucky because I’ve never been out of work since I started acting, and I’ve been in some big studio films, but that’s not actually enough creatively.”But it is impossible to disregard her appearance. Famke Janssen moved from Holland to New York as a model 20 years ago, gave up the catwalk to act and made her name as a Bond Girl. Her role as Xenia Onatopp in the 1995’s GoldenEye was memorable chiefly because of the glee with which she played the Russian assassin, who crushed men to death between her thighs. In her other notable role, she has played the telepathic mutant Dr Jean Grey in the X-Men franchise.