This is Marion Cotillard for the July issue of Vogue. She’s a gorgeous woman and these are lovely photos… but is it just me, or does she not look quite like Marion Cotillard? At first glance, I thought it was Zooey Deschanel. The whole point of the profile is for Marion to promote her role in Inception, but she refuses to talk about the character she plays, or even what the film is about. So, eh. The full Vogue piece is here, and here are some of the scant highlights:

On her American accent: “I still have problems with A’s and L’s—especially at the end of a word.”

On her diet and environmentalism: She wants to find choux romanesco “that looks like fractals,” rejects melons from Morocco—”Fragile fruit has to travel by air; too big a carbon footprint.” An eco-warrior who works with Tristan Lecomte and his Alter Eco reforestation project, she’s a locavore who knows her greens. And her fish. Marion and her two brothers, twins Guillaume and Quentin, learned to cook defensively when their mother took up macrobiotics.

Studying acting: “As a teenager, I didn’t want to be me; I wanted to be many different people. Maybe I realized that they all lived inside me and that if I managed to connect with them, they would become aspects of me.”

On wanting more than just work in France: “The directors I dreamed of were Coppola, Scorsese, Tim Burton, David Lynch, Spielberg because of E.T. I wasn’t considered an actress. I didn’t want to get bitter while waiting for something to happen, so when I was 27, I told my agent I was stopping and going to work for Greenpeace. He said, ‘Please just have this one meeting.’ It was with Tim Burton, for Big Fish, and I got the part.”

On playing Edith Piaf: “There was one little problem: The finance people didn’t want me… I learned how to make the space inside me for her to come in.” Along with hard work and intense research, there was mystical surrender and some mimicry—her brothers saw that she had copied their great-uncle’s walk for Piaf’s later years. When the film was over, she couldn’t shake Piaf. Her hairline and her eyebrows were still shaved. She fled with Canet to Peru and the Amazon; she went to Bora Bora with her best friend, Geraldine. “It was there that I found myself articulating why Piaf was still living inside me. She had been abandoned as a child; her greatest fear was to be alone. Now I didn’t want to abandon her. I finally was able to say, ‘She’s been dead for 40 years; it’s OK.’ “

[From Vogue]

I realized when I saw Marion and the cast of Nine on Oprah during the awards season that Marion is a very peculiar woman. Not bad peculiar, just a bit eccentric, or, as we say in the South, “whifty”. She’s not dumb, she’s not untalented, she just seems to not be able to really put into words whatever starburst-afghan-blanket-kitten-yawn nonsense if rattling around in her brain. And before you say that perhaps something is lost in translation, don’t. Her English is spectacular. She’s just weird.

Photos courtesy of The Fashion Spot and Vogue‘s slideshow.