Antonia Quirke - Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers

This was the formative incident of my childhood. We lived in a tiny hill village in the South of France where every Saturday old Claude would lead his donkey Napoleon up the winding rocky path to the village square, laden with dusty old reels of film. The loveable village blacksmith, Rémi, would set up his projector facing the whitewashed wall of the church, Claude would feed in those magical strips of colour and light, and everyone would abandon their baking and games of pétanque and come rushing into the square agog with excitement to see the wondrous spectacles: Police Academy 6, Porky's, Evil Dead 2, Conan the Destroyer and Turner & Hooch.

I had been banned from the magical screenings in the square since I seemed so overwhelmed by the power of these ‘movies’. Yet old Claude took pity on me and allowed me to climb up his ancient olive tree from whose branches –

Alright. It wasn't the formative incident of my childhood. Life isn't so neatly patterned. But the first time I saw Marlon Brando, I nearly died.

Some time afterwards you could have found me standing outside Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford with my elder brother Saul and my younger brother Ben, all three of us holding up the books we had just bought with our pocket money so my mother could take a picture. Ben's book was called Where Do I Come From? and Saul's was called What is Happening to Me? My book was called Who Am I? Who am I? I'm a girl who loves actors.

We lived next door to the writer Jan Morris, and one day my mother said to me, ‘Antonia, listen, I've got something to tell you. James from next door is now Jan. So if you see him wearing a dress, tell her how pretty it is.’ And I thought: Isn't that nice? Anything to do with sex was nice. Sex had our respect. The defining struggle of my father's life had been between the Catholic priesthood and my mother. Sex had fought with God, as an equal, until they could both see each other's point of view. The children were the winners. And so we liked sex. As a nurse, my mother tended to turn everything into biology. ‘That bit at the top,’ she would say, when Ben and I were in the bath, ‘is Ben's foreskin. And those are his testicles!’ Bodies were nothing to be ashamed of. At fancy dress parties Saul and Ben and I went naked as Adam, Cain and Eve, saving on the price of costumes. We carried an enormous brown-and-yellow-striped home-knitted snake that was otherwise used as a draught-excluder. When we grew too old to go as Adam and Eve, we attended parties as Pollution, dressed in black and trailing empty cans of tuna while our new brothers and sisters nakedly paraded the snake. We were eco-friendly. The stickers in our car said ‘Nurses Against the Bomb’ and ‘Goats Rule’.

When my father became a psychologist, we moved to Manchester and lived in a modest house with campaigning students as lodgers, and the children kept coming: Patrick, Suzannah, Luke and Molly. ‘Do you know what Mum and Dad are?’ Suzannah asked me and my friend Mischa, as the three of us whiled away an afternoon inserting Crayolas into our vaginas. ‘What?’ ‘Perverts , that's what they are.’ ‘Perverts,’ I whispered to myself, rather liking the sound of it. Mischa's glamorous Australian mother Jill wrote the questions for University Challenge among piles of textbooks in her kitchen. It was not a happy house. Jill drank, and kept a bitter eye on Mischa's father Bruce, who came and went in a chocolate Jaguar, supposedly dealing antiques from the boot but mostly parked around the corner with the woman from Thresher's.

Right off the bat, my mother wasn't keen on Mischa, having caught me leaning up against a bureau inhaling on a pencil and saying to Ben: ‘You are a cold-hearted prick who wants to see me hanging from a tree in the garden.’ I had been possessed by the glamour of adultery. The atmosphere at Mischa's was always one of potential murder. The phenomenal scale of the arguments. The range and randomness of the information spilled, the strength-regathering silences in between. When she wasn't working, Jill sat stiffly in an armchair in the study, her dark hair falling to her waist in one solid piece like a bin-bag. There she would relay the drama down the telephone to Bamber Gascoigne.

‘Oh, thank Christ,’ she said when Gascoigne picked up at the other end. ‘Bamber – he's here! But he's pissed.’ Bruce, sober, handed her a glass of water and some aspirin. Jill looked up at him and spoke, low, into the phone. ‘He's making me take some pills. I don't know what they are.’

On Tuesdays I rushed from my convent school to join Mischa and Jill watching Johnny Weissmuller being Tarzan on the television. Weissmuller would come down a tree like a Greek statue and rush off in his flank-flashing pants to meet people at the escarpment , a place we mysteriously never saw.

‘Those shorts look like they just about cover his scrotum,’ I noted.

‘Christ,’ said Jill in her boozy voice, ‘you Quirkes with your goats, and your Song of the Volga Boatman.’

It was at Mischa's that I saw my first videos. One was called My French Lover and involved a man and a woman carrying a big plastic doll with a moustache into a bedroom and then getting under the sheets and laughing like maniacs. I seem to have blanked the rest. When I told my parents about this, I was banned from visiting number fifteen again. I slipped off in the rain to tell Mischa but she was calm, like someone used to having the ends of things spelled out and then revoked on a daily basis. ‘Je reviens,’ I said, a line I'd picked up watching Emmanuelle with Jill.

Because Mischa and I weren't allowed to see each other we kept in touch by writing letters that Ben would deliver. Mischa had become very beautiful and began first to sign off as Marilyn Monroe and then to write as her. I responded as James Dean, and the two doomed stars began an affair. This grew into a very serious correspondence which required a great deal of biographical knowledge. I had a stack of Dean biographies and books of photos of him. (It never occurred to me to watch any of his films.) But Mischa was a couple of years older than me and when she went to try her luck as a trainee teacher in Tokyo, she wrote to me as herself rather than Monroe, as if Marilyn had dumped Jimmy – which offended Dean. He wrote to her from the set of Giant throughout those fraught early months of 1955. He was bewildered, hurt, jealous of Joe DiMaggio and suspicious that she might be forming an attachment with a playwright on the New York scene. But nothing came back from Tokyo, just chatter about food and friends. Was that what drove him to such near-suicidal recklessness? He burned her old letters. He'd be dead within the year.

I got four C's and an E in my GCSEs and failed the rest. But because I spent most of the next year recovering from an operation on my hip I didn't have to go to school and just sat in my room reading. I got four A's at A level. I convalesced in the arms of Antony Sher's Year of the King (about his Richard III for the RSC) and Simon Callow's Being an Actor and Stanislavski's Building a Character, and back to Year of the King, flicking ahead to my favourite bits, which were always about what Sher said to Roger Allam at the Arden Hotel bar. Nothing more comforting than that sense of the extended family which actors thrive in. Year of the King is just about the happiest book I've ever read, the most soothing, which is not what Sher meant at all, but there you go: actors' first neurosis is that acting is just too much fun to be art. I wanted to be in the Arden Hotel bar with Roger Allam.

So I decided I was going to be an actress and auditioned at the Contact Youth Theatre for a play called Don Juan Comes Back From the War and got the part of a bisexual dress designer who dates Don Juan after meeting him in a café in 1920s Vienna, gets dumped, strips and throws plates at his head. I petitioned my mother to hire me a sunbed so I could appear on stage with the tan I felt the part required, but she flatly refused. ‘You are what you are,’ she said.