Now, Binoche may have an Oscar for her role in The English Patient, but the sexual attraction that pulses between them in Horseman clearly looks like something more than just good acting. On the subject of romance, though, Martinez turns coy, squirming on that plastic banquette at an alarming pace. He refuses to speak of the affair. Then, minutes later, the subject of The English Patient crops up and he launches into a tender tribute to his lover.

"The big difference with Juliette and the others in that film is that she goes beyond acting." he says. "You're no longer conscious it's a role. She takes it to the purest dimension where she just is. She simply dazzles."

Martinez admits that he has learned a lot from the great actors he has worked with, but it's been by example more than coaching. "When I was working with Mastronianni, in between scenes we chatted about what we were going to eat that night, not how I should play the scene. But then as soon as the cameras rolled, Boof! You could see his concentration, his fluidity, his ease.

Then comes some Latin bravado: "And what's more I've got no need for anyone to tell me how to do it. I am not interested. You act how you want to and leave me alone to do my own thing."

"Stubborn, stubborn, stubborn," is how he describes himself.

On the face of it, Martinez has had an easy ride--one day acting school, the next starring alongside the legendary Montrand. Any yet there's something about him that hints at struggle. Maybe it's his broken nose, or the way he sometimes bristles defensively: He got into acting, he snarls, "To get myself out of the crap."

Then he tones it down and explains. "I was looking around to do something with my life, and I didn't have that many options. I wasn't great a school, I didn't have a profession and face it, we are in a system where you're either born rich, hence strong, or poor, hence weak. Well, I wasn't rich, but I wasn't weak either."

His father is French Algerian, a former middleweight boxing champion of North Africa. His mother is from Brittany, and Martinez was brought up in the working class suburbs of Paris. Men in his family traditionally box until they can't anymore, and then go to work as garage mechanics. He's willing to add that his parents were surprised when he got himself into acting school. But press any further about his background and his deals out a swift rap about prying journalists, before catching himself and winningly saying: "Would you like to try my chocolate tart?"

It's only later, when describing one of his favorite films --Luchino Visconti's Italian classic, Rocco and His Brothers --that Martinez reveals visceral pride in his working-class roots. "That's a real movie about the suburbs. It shows the family, it shows people with modest means but if shows them with a sense of dignity and honor, not characterized as some kind of monkeys."

Before his desert holiday, Martinez was in Italy filming The Chambermaid on the Titanic, directed by hip Spanish director Bigas Lunas and due out in Europe in November. The movie, says Martinez, is "a story of a man betrayed in love, who tries to escape reality through his imagination," and has nothing to do with the ship disaster. Chambermaid was Martinez's first film since his small part in Bertrand Blier's movie Mon Homme back in 1995.

"I've turned down a lot of movies," he says, to explain his long absence from the screen. And? "Oh, I've been growing leeks and carrots in the garden and playing boules, That's were I'm totally un-American. I don't have a problem with not working. For me being an actor is a job. It's a pleasant job, but it's a job. If I could do nothing, I would do nothing."

Yet he's giving the gardening a break to work again with Lunas on a movie about a father-and-son relationship that's based in the Spanish bullfighting ring. "It's the tough side of bull fighting, not the sequins," he insists.

And his ambitions at the moment don't run to glittery stardom in Hollywood, to the action roles taken by Antonio Banderas (to whom he's often compared). he says U.S. blockbuster movies lack "nobility and honor".

Then, as he frequently does, Martinez rethinks. "Of course if Stanley Kubrick asked me, I'd be off like a shot," he says.

Alicia Drake
Fall 1997 Fashion Supplement to W Magazine