Juliette Binoche on Meeting 'Free Spirit' Shirley MacLaine: 'She Told Me All About Her Lovers' (Exclusive)

Juliette Binoche is all smiles when asked about meeting an idol of hers: Shirley MacLaine. 

“She's a free spirit, free heart and she doesn't take any bulls---,” she tells PEOPLE of her fellow Oscar-winning actress. “She's a worker. A dancer, actor and writer.”

How did Binoche, 59, end up spending “two and a half hours talking about life” with one of cinema’s most prolific performers — and snap rare photos with her for Instagram? Since the stars share both a publicist and an agent, it was just a matter of Binoche saying, “I want to meet with her” for lunch.

“I saw her in The Apartment. I saw her in Irma la Douce and, of course, Terms of Endearment. I always felt this figure is so free, and witty, and fun and full of energy.”

MacLaine, who celebrated her 89th birthday last April, was everything Binoche hoped, further noting that MacLaine said she was “excited to meet” the Chocolat star too. 

“She's fun to be with,” Binoche says. She adds a juicy detail that, no, she will not elaborate on: The Steel Magnolias star “told me all about her lovers. It was fun.”

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MacLaine’s list of awards throughout her almost seven-decade career includes an Academy Award (for 1984’s Terms of Endearment costarring Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson), an Emmy (for 1976 variety special Gypsy in My Soul) and six competitive Golden Globe Awards plus the Globes’ lifetime achievement Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1998.

Binoche, an Oscar winner herself for 1996’s The English Patient, discussed many of MacLaine’s stage and screen roles during their fateful lunch.

Both actresses have brought French fashion designer Coco Chanel to the screen, MacLaine in the 2006 TV movie Coco Chanel and Binoche in Todd A. Kessler’s new Apple TV+ limited series The New Look (out now).

Noting with a laugh that The New Look happens to appear on the same day as her other major project, The Taste of Things, Binoche admits to PEOPLE she is often busy.

“You know what? I love my work,” she says. “I'm passionate about what I do, because it's an exploration of life, and it gives me joy. It's as simple as that.”

Writer-director Trần Anh Hùng’s award-winning The Taste of Things, which expands to wide theatrical release on Valentine’s Day, ranks among the most romantic of Binoche’s movies. Starring as Eugénie, a cook in 1885 France, the actress prepares elaborate dishes in real time on camera, with only limited prior training from consulting chef Pierre Gagnaire. 

A love for French cuisine, inherited from her mother and passed onto her son Raphaël, 30, and daughter Hana, 24, wasn’t all that made the movie personal for Binoche. Playing her onscreen lover and fellow gastronomer in The Taste of Things is Benoît Magimel, whom Binoche dated from 1998 to 2003 — and hadn’t spoken to in years. 

“The first day of shooting, I could see that there was a wall between us, and I thought, 'Wow. This is war,' ” recalls Binoche. “Then I kissed him good morning, and we were going to eat this omelet together that we see at the beginning of the film. It just cracked the ice.”

United in “trying to do the best dang film" possible, “I was so moved to work with him," she says tearfully. "Those words that Hùng wrote were really the bridge that made our relationship free and transformed the past into a present that was lovely. Because I always loved him, even though we had conflicts.”

When the two actors’ daughter Hana saw the film, adds Binoche, their long-overdue reunion became even more special. “She said it was a healing time.”

The Taste of Things is in theaters now.