Arielle Dombasle, a movie actress who is half of France’s most famous couple—her husband is Bernard-Henri Lévy, the dashing philosopher-journalist and timber-fortune heir—has hitherto been best known in this country for her appearance, in 1984, in the steamy miniseries “Lace,” in which she played one of the bitches who were not Phoebe Cates’s mother. She is about to present another facet of her artistic personality, that of chanteuse: next week she will be appearing at the Supper Club, performing hits from the forties and fifties that she delivers in a breathy Gallic soprano. The effect is as if Marilyn Monroe had attempted to channel Edith Piaf; and Dombasle, who is forty-eight and has long, honey-blond hair, a pronounced pout, and what has plausibly been described as the smallest waist in Paris, has been performing to capacity crowds all over France.

The other night, Dombasle was rehearsing in a recording studio in the West Twenties with the New York Big Band, which will be accompanying her at the Supper Club. She wore a clingy, fine-gauge cashmere sweater and low-rise jeans, her hair was pulled back into a fur scrunchie, and a pair of Chanel sunglasses sat atop her head. “Look how pretty they are! And so old!” she said, casting an approving eye over the mostly grizzled heads of the assembled musicians, some of whom could have played the songs on Dombasle’s last album, “Amor Amor”—“Rhum and Coca-Cola,” “Bésame Mucho”—when they were fresh, new compositions. Joe Battaglia, the band’s elderly leader, referred to her as “young lady.”

“You photograph well,” he said, looking at a picture, propped on her music stand, of a sultry Dombasle embracing her late, beloved cat, Sloogy.

“Well, with the right lighting everyone does,” Dombasle said.

The era from which her repertoire is drawn was an époque bénie in which Franco-American relations were at their warmest, Dombasle had explained earlier in the week over tea at the Carlyle Hotel. She was born in Connecticut to French parents and brought up in Mexico, where her grandfather, an intimate of de Gaulle, was ambassador. She admits to a fondness for the United States currently uncommon among her French peers. “There is so much misunderstanding,” she said with a sigh. “When they pour wine in the streets here, it is a pity. And in France, too, they have so many wrong ideas in the head.”

She shares her conviction of the virtues of America with her husband, whose most recent book, “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville,” was a spectacularly panned national tour d’horizon, and his first American best-seller. Dombasle and B.H.L., as he is known in France, have been married for thirteen years, having conducted a clandestine affair for the previous seven while both were married to other people. She claims to have fallen in love with B.H.L. in 1979, solely on the strength of a brooding photograph on the cover of “La Barbarie à Visage Humain,” the book that made him famous in France, because, she thought, he looked like Christ. The couple has homes in Paris and in Marrakech, where they bought a palace whose previous owners include Alain Delon and J. Paul Getty, Jr. “Of course, with money you travel first class, so it is more comfortable, but that is the only thing money brings,” Dombasle said. Her Latin songs are in part a tribute to the Mexican maids who reared her. “I was miserable in my extraordinary castle,” she said, “and I was happy with my poor maids in the barrio.”

She moved to Paris at eighteen to study classical Baroque opera but was “stolen by the movies”; her breakthrough role was in Eric Rohmer’s “Pauline at the Beach.” These days, she prefers singing to acting. “I’ve been singing in some remote places, for instance in Bordeaux, where I don’t know a soul,” she said. “And still people come in order to get a moment of communion.” During a break in the rehearsal, Dombasle had an opportunity for a moment of communion, or at least of communication, with the musicians, who found it charming to mingle with a French movie star even if they had not seen any of her movies, and among whom there were several who remembered when Franco-American relations had been very warm indeed. “I only learned to say two things in French,” said John Scorzello, a trumpet player who had been stationed in France after the war. “Combien? and Bonjour, mon petit poulet.”

- Rebecca Mead