Nicole's on the crest of a wave; Renault star Estelle Skornik is hanging up her car keys and, Chris Hughes hears, is setting sail in the pounds 14m series Hornblower.
When she drove her father's car onto our TV screens seven years ago, the cheeky French daddy's girl set a million male pulses racing and Nicole and Papa became a hit.But, 300,000 Renault car sales in Britain and the biggest deluge of fan mail from a single ad campaign later, beautiful Parisienne actress Estelle Skornik has had enough.
Now Estelle - or Nicole as she is universally known - has hung up the keys to her Clio forever, but her legions of British admirers shouldn't despair. She is about to make her British debut as a serious actress with a leading role in the most expensive series ever made - ITV's pounds 14 million dramatisation of CS Forester's seafaring epic, Hornblower. The Renault ads - culminating in the recent Graduate spoof with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer - made Estelle the most popular French import since Beaujolais, but the time has come for the woman recently tagged the 15th most beautiful in the world to move on.
In her homeland she is well established as a serious actress and to that you can add a steely determination which is etched in her genes. She comes from a family of Polish Jews who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis, and Estelle derives particular inspiration from her paternal grandfather who was a hero of Auschwitz concentration camp.
"It is only as Nicole that the British know me. I guess it's okay, but I want them to know I am an actress as well. I am very happy for this opportunity to persuade English people that I am something different than Nicole," she says determinedly.
In Hornblower, Estelle, 27, plays the stunning French girl Mariette who falls in love with Captain Horatio Hornblower himself, played by the unknown Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd (pronounced Yowan Griffith). Ioan, 24, is the good-looking chap who saved Kate Winslet from drowning in Titanic, and he's already being dubbed Britain's very own Leonardo DiCaprio.
At pounds 3 million per episode, Hornblower knocks all previous TV dramas into a tin can. It took two years to make and the centrepiece, which holed the budget below the waterline, is a 125ft, 43 ton, 24 gun, full-size replica of Hornblower's ship, HMS Indefatigable. It is the first British frigate in 150 years to be hand-built from wood and was constructed in Turkey.
The series - which charts the rise of Hornblower through the ranks during the Napoleonic wars - was made in Portugal and the Ukraine, with most of the action shot on The Black Sea. Conditions were freezing for both cast and crew, but despite this - and the fact that Estelle got injured in a scene where she had to fall out of a second-storey window on to a mattress - her eyes light up at the prospect of her first British TV role. "This is really exciting for me. My character does not allow anyone to tell 'er what to do. She is quite an independent person - a bit like me. She even tells 'Ornblower to follow his own instincts and she is very determined. That's what I like about her," she says.
Despite the fact that Hornblower concentrates on the 18th century battles the British had with the French, Estelle bears no grudges.
"No, I don't mind that at all - I love England and the English. I really like their sense of humour. I also love London, although Paris has everything for me. Maybe one day I will come and live in England, but for the time being I am happy with Paris."
In the Renault ads, 5ft 2ins Estelle flirted with a string of men. She even appeared semi-naked in a play in Newcastle, but in real life she has been dating her French financier boyfriend Marc, 32, for over a year. "I believe that relationships should be close, whereas Nicole has had a different boyfriend every time," she says.
Estelle's family history is worthy of a drama in itself. As the Second World War loomed and the Germans stepped up their persecution of Polish Jews, Estelle's grandfather Lazare managed to smuggle her father, then 15, to a safe-house in Lyon, France. That city later became the epicentre of the French Resistance, and executions at the hands of the Gestapo were commonplace.
Lazare was incarcerated in the notorious Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz from which he managed to escape three times. On the final occasion he clambered from the top of a train outside the camp only to be spotted and shot dead.
Estelle was brought up in a middle-class home in Paris, the daughter of Jacques, a furnishings importer and Mireille. She has an elder sister Helene, who also lives in Paris.
Despite her Gallic upbringing, she is immensely proud of her lineage, "Keeping the name Skornik, which is very Polish, is my tribute to my father and especially to my grandfather, whose bravery was so extraordinary.
"It has made me glad to be alive and made me even more ambitious, so I give everything to my work."
As Hornblower hits our screens this week we will be able to sample further fruits of Estelle's driving ambition - though this time there won't be a car in sight.
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| Author: | Hughes, Chris |
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| Publication: | The Mirror (London, England) |
| Date: | Oct 3, 1998 |
| Words: | 866 |
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