As a movie, The Beach has taken a furious beating, like a tropical island being lashed by a hurricane.

 The storm is taking its toll. Former 'King of the World' Leonardo DiCaprio's reputation is sinking. Likewise that of filmmaker Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame.

 But DiCaprio's co-star, French starlet Virginie Ledoyen, has remained standing, ready to prosper from her Hollywood breakthrough.

 First, however, she has to fight the gossip columnists who have linked her romantically with DiCaprio -- even through she already has a French boyfriend.

 "It's just stupid," she snaps about being linked with Leo.

 The reports surfaced last year when the 23-year-old Ledoyen was shooting The Beach with the 25-year-old DiCaprio on the beleaguered island of Phi Phi Le in Thailand. She tried to ignore the fuss.

 "I didn't read about it. Some people told me. Then I just decided to ignore it." She tried to concentrate on her work. "I didn't want to be surrounded by stupid rumours."

 Ledoyen is a native of Paris. Her father is a salesman and her mother runs a suburban Paris restaurant called Venice. Ledoyen doesn't mince words. She already is on the record deflating DiCaprio's ego by shrugging off his on-screen kisses.

 "I've had better kisses," she has said. "I've had worse."

 In the movie, Ledoyen participates in a simulated underwater sexual tryst with DiCaprio. It was a big deal to her, but not because she was frolicking with the superstar of Titanic.

 "You're always nervous when you have to do a love scene, not just because of Leo. But he was playful and made me feel really comfortable. He would joke all the time. Especially in this love scene, it was really tough. It wasn't romantic at all. We were under water. We couldn't breathe. But finally we had a good time. It was just unreal to do this scene."

 Much more interesting to sex-scene fans will be Ledoyen's next French film release, In All Innocence, reputed to be hot-hot-hot. Oddly, her co-star is Cesar-winning Guillaume Canet, the same Frenchman she jilts in The Beach to take up with DiCaprio when they arrive in their 'paradise' in Thailand.

 Ledoyen is a classic French ingenue: Slight, sensuous, pouty and beautiful enough that L'Oreal made her one of its Dream Team promotional members with Claudia Schiffer and Gong Li at the Cannes Film Festival last year. She speaks English with a lilting accent that invariably charms.

 She made her debut as a model at age two. She made her movie debut at nine in an Italian comedy. Her American movie debut was a small role in A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. She even has made a French musical, the AIDS-themed Jeanne And The Perfect Guy, which was released in Toronto last year (although Ledoyen was insufferable in it).

 Now she is shooting a new dramatic version of Les Miserables in Prague with Gerard Depardieu and John Malkovich. French director Josee Dayan is filming it simultaneously in both English and French.

By BRUCE KIRKLAND