Actress and model Laetitia Casta eyes serious movies

Models have crossed over into acting for years, but only a select group have become prominent actors. There's Lauren Bacall, of course, and Isabella Rossellini. There's Milla Jovovich, Uma Thurman and not too many others.

Laetitia Casta looks set to join that prestigious company. Over the course of a decade-plus on the big screen, the 34-year-old has worked with a wide range of serious international directors, from Patrice Leconte to Tsai Ming-Liang, on significant movies. She's even earned a nomination from the Cesars, the French Oscars, for playing screen legend Brigitte Bardot in "Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life."

Last month, Casta could be seen as Richard Gere's mistress in the high-quality Wall Street thriller "Arbitrage" and the veteran cover model (who has graced everything from Vogue to Rolling Stone) stars in the WWII-set "War of the Buttons," an adaptation of the famous novel about a conflict between rival groups of children in rural Nazi occupied France. "Buttons" opens in theaters Friday.

Because Casta has successfully avoided superficial, eye-candy parts, it might seem like she easily found her way to serious roles. But that's not the case, she says.

"It's been like 10 years that I've been in the cinema industry and it's taken me a long time to be [taken] seriously," Casta says. "Especially in France, [it's] even more tough than here in America. In America, they don't care. The only thing they care [about] is if you have talent. In France, [that's] not enough, especially when you used to be a model."

From the beginning, though, Casta approached her movie career with substance in mind: "My choice was important," she says. "Not just being a pretty girl in a stupid movie, just trying to really emotionally give something important ... and [do] something really personal."