Jacqueline Bisset
'Older women continue to want sex but men don't want to sleep with them'
In Welcome to New York, she plays the long-suffering wife of an adulterous financier, based on Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Here she talks about sexual desire and what divides men and women
Catherine Shoard
@catherineshoard
Thursday 24 July 2014 17.17 BST
Jacqueline Bisset would be lost without her snozz. "I could never sleep with someone who didn't smell right," she says. "For me, smell is intoxicating. It's an animal thing and very, very dangerous." What's the ideal odour? "I can't possibly sum it up. Not like perfume, but clean, for sure – I'm not into smelly armpits." She smiles and sips her peach juice. We're sitting at a breakfast bar in a French hotel, fruit platter in front and sax Muzak in the background. "Probably when you're in love you have some sort of addiction. You can't see straight. Voice is another one that pulls a woman back. When you're trying to break up with someone and you hear them on the telephone – suddenly you're back in that place."
When she shares such theories with male friends, she says, they tend to tell her smell doesn't share the same potency for them. "'What?' I say. 'You're nuts! I find that really hard to believe.' 'Jacqueline, you're wrong – men don't care about that.'" Her eyes pop in shock at the memory.
Bisset's new film, Welcome to New York, makes much of the notion of universal primal weakness, that women and men are equally enslaved by their hormones. Bisset plays Simone, long-suffering wife of Gérard Depardieu's vastly adulterous financier Georges Devereaux (the film is inspired by the downfall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn). Director Abel Ferrara gave both actors free rein to improvise; in one scene, following Georges' release from custody on an attempted rape charge, Simone bemoans the fact that one whiff of him is all it takes for her to be back in his thrall. You can see why Ferrara was keen to keep in the final cut the idea that irrational action is a biological function.