[Just a note: Although, the article purports that Johnny and Vanessa "announced" they are expecting again, this is not true and to the contrary, Johnny's reps have refuted the claim.]

French actress Vanessa Paradis is pregnant with Johnny Depp's second child, but the happy couple aren't going to stop at just two

Vanessa Paradis admires the antique setting around the enormous diamond she's sporting on her third finger, left hand.

"It's a love ring," she explains. "I don't want to put a name on it, you know?

We are -- however you want to call it -- engaged, married, in love forever. Whether we signed a paper or not, we are married."

The man in the life of the 27-year-old French singer and actress is, of course, American actor Johnny Depp, 36. They are the parents of toddler Lily-Rose Melody, whose arrival appears to have transformed hellraiser Johnny, and left Vanessa -- whose former boyfriends include rocker Lenny Kravitz --wondering why she hadn't discovered this motherhood thing earlier. Just last week, the happy couple announced that Vanessa is now pregnant with their second child. And they don't plan to stop at two children.

"I have in my head the numbers three or five," she says in her mixture of French and American accents. "One day people are not going to be so interested in me. I hope one day I'll just be at home, cooking some cakes."

Home is Paris, and a country house near Saint Tropez in the south of France, but for now Vanessa is in Los Angeles, promoting the international release of her fifth movie, La Fille Sure Le Pont (The Girl On The Bridge).

Slight, and dressed in a skirt and long-sleeved T-shirt in reds, greens and black, with red stockings and brown boots, she looks more like a teenager than a woman planning on five kids.

"I love colours," she says. "It's a bit too much for my boyfriend, who wears mainly black, and I'm scaring him with all the colours I have in my wardrobe."

She sits on a big sofa in an art deco-style suite at the famed Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, within walking distance of Johnny's infamous club, the Viper Room.

She checked in as Mrs. Nelson, to avoid any photographers. In the past, her partner has been known to confront such snappers with violence, but stories that she and Johnny decided to live in France to avoid less subtle elements of American media are, however, not true.

"No, not at all," Vanessa says. "It is true that we don't want to bring our kids up here. Life is dangerous everywhere, but it's more dangerous here. And Europe has such a history and a charm that you ought to grow and live in that."

While Lily-Rose Melody is nowhere to be seen in the Chateau Marmont suite, it's obvious she is never far from her devoted mother's thoughts and affections.

"She brings tears of joy to me every day, because she's so amazing," Vanessa says. "I know every parent speaks like I do, and I don't sound any different, but it's like that -- it does that to you. I know it sounds cliched.

"She's nine months old, and every night we watch her sleeping. There's not much going on when she sleeps, but we do ... we just look at her. She's just an angel from the sky; a pure angel.

"There's no time for superficiality. There's just the three of us, and that's all that matters. We both have a lot to do, and we both work, but everything comes after her -- that little person.

"One day, she's going to be an adult, and she's going to walk out the door. I'm already thinking of it, and it's really going to stab a knife in my stomach. I hope she's going to be happy right next door, so I can go and see her every two seconds."

Johnny, says the proud mother, speaks to his daughter in both English and his recently learned French. "He's really incredible how he picks it up," she says. Both parents play guitar for their child.

"She loves music, because all the way through my pregnancy, we always played a lot and listened to a lot of music, and I was writing songs, so I had the guitar across my belly, playing all the time."

Lily-Rose Melody will not be seeing her mother's new film for some time yet, however. In La Fille Sur Le Pont, Vanessa plays Adel, a young woman on whom men have the same effect as clothes: "I want to try them all." But perpetual bad luck and failed encounters lead her one night to a Paris bridge, where she thinks about a suicidal plunge into the Seine.

That is where she meets Gabor (Daniel Auteuil), who tells her bridges are good spots to recruit reckless young women for his circus knife-throwing act. Suddenly, her luck changes. But for how long?

The film was shot in black and white, which, Vanessa says, "automatically gives it a timeless, classic sense."

A Canadian critic who saw the film obviously thought along the same lines. Vanessa, he gushes, has "the aura of film legends: Jean Moreau's eyes, Marilyn Monroe's voice and Jean Seberg's bob."

"Yeah," Vanessa replies. "And Jane Birkin's tits, too!"