Actress Charlotte Rampling is ready to find love again, saying: “I’m an animal that needs a mate”.

The screen star, 71, lost her long-time partner Jean-Noel Tassez to cancer two years ago.

She told The Daily Telegraph: “I want somebody to love. For the first time since Jean-Noel died, I’m yearning to build something with someone new.

Charlotte Rampling  (Ian Nicholson/PA)
Charlotte Rampling (Ian Nicholson/PA)

“I want all that again. I’m an animal that needs a mate, and I know it’s going to happen because I really want it to.”

The Oscar-nominated actress, who was famed for her beauty when she shot to stardom in the 1960s, said that the pressures surrounding appearance were more difficult for today’s women.

“What these girls go through now is much worse. We weren’t constantly thinking about our own image. It was lovely, actually – we were like young colts who were told to just ‘go and gallop’, and so off we all galloped, even though we didn’t know where we were going,” she said.

“Now these girls just have one goal and that’s to have an image: they want celebrity, they want to be on the red carpet, they want to ‘be there’. But where?”

Charlotte Rampling
Charlotte Rampling (Ian West/PA)

Rampling, who posed naked at the age of 63 beside the Mona Lisa in the Louvre for fashion photographer Juergen Teller, said she wanted to see her face ageing and is not tempted by plastic surgery.

“My face could do with having a few things done to it but I won’t touch it,” she said.

“I can still bear to look at myself, and you know what? I’d like to see my face get very old. I’m curious to see where it’ll go.

“Although I’d probably look ‘prettier’ without great heavy lines and with it all tightly pulled back, that’s not what I want to look like.”