Playing Coco: Coco Chanel

Given her long, colourful life and enduring, worldwide influence, it isn't a surprise that Coco Chanel, who died in July 1971, should be the subject of a veritable raft of projects – though why they should be happening simultaneously is perhaps more difficult to fathom.

A new biography, by esteemed style writer Justine Picardie, is due out in the autumn; a TV mini-series starring Shirley MacLaine aired in the United States late last year, and not one, but two French movies have recently been made: Coco and Igor, which closed the Cannes Film Festival last month, and Coco Avant Chanel, which opens here on Friday. By further coincidence, each film has a "face" of Chanel as its star: Anna Mouglalis (who represents Allure Sensuelle) and Audrey Tautou (No 5) respectively. There are even rumours about further biographical films, including a Hollywood one with Demi Moore's name attached to it.

But it's not just Coco Chanel's longevity and influence – or those of her brand – that explain the proliferation of portraits of her; it's also the fact that she had so many very different chapters in her story: her years at the epicentre of Parisian culture and society, the Occupation when she took a Nazi as her lover, her post-war exile in Switzerland, her eventual comeback after somehow escaping charges for collaboration. One, definitive, biopic would be hard-pushed to do justice to her richly textured, densely peopled life. (The mini-series tried but is reported to have failed.)

So, we have Coco and Igor, which focuses on one of her many romantic relationships: the affair with composer Igor Stravinsky, which took place in the 1920s. And we have Coco Avant Chanel which, despite a coda that shows Chanel as the queen bee of the fashion scene, ends just as the couturiere is on the brink of her breakthrough in Paris, in the early 1920s. Given that Coco Chanel was born in 1883, it covers less than half of her 87 years. But this was undoubtedly the period that shaped the woman Chanel became.

The arrestingly beautiful Audrey Tautou, the star of Amelie and also, by sheer coincidence, of the brand-new advertising campaign for Chanel No 5, agrees that the elderly Chanel who impressed interviewers with her straight-talking, no-nonsense manner and unsentimental airs was the product of the period covered by Coco Avant Chanel. "Life hardened her – she toughened up," Tautou says. This, after all, was when Chanel had to deal with the realisation that her background, first of all as an illegitimate child raised in an orphanage and then as a lowly seamstress and cabaret singer, would prevent her from being completely accepted by high society.

Aristocrats could fall in love with her and welcome her into their homes, but they would only ever have her as a mistress or lover; never as a wife. Even Arthur "Boy" Capel, the young Englishman, who – as Coco Avant Chanel suggests – was the love of her life, chose to marry someone from his own background rather than Chanel, the girl he really loved. His sudden death, in 1919, was – as Edmonde Charles-Roux, the author of the book on which Coco Avant Chanel was loosely based, points out – the second time she had mourned him, since she was already grieving for the future she had hoped they would have as a married couple.

Of course, Chanel's personality and much of her private life during her formative years can only be hypothesised since she never wrote her memoirs, and the writer who was to be her official biographer gave up in frustration because she wouldn't admit even the most readily verified facts, such as her time in the orphanage.

And yet it's not as if she had begun to believe her own story, as can happen when people tell the same lies over and over: she freely confessed to making up her past. "I invented my life because I didn't like my life," was one of her many memorable quotes.

The gamine Tautou, who was intrigued by what lay behind the "facade" of the tough old bird that Chanel, in her later years, seemed to be, says: "By focusing on her early years, we could show something of her vulnerability, because she always said that one constant through her life was loneliness."

The problem with the film showing only the early chapters of Chanel's life is that, although it introduces us to a quietly determined, slightly introverted yet eccentric and forward-thinking young woman, it doesn't point out the extremely interesting and important fact that Chanel was so desperate to be accepted that she erased her past, or that she was a fickle character who moved with the "in" crowd: so much so that when the Nazis moved in and occupied Paris, she took up with them.

Tautou, who in another coincidence, hails from the same part of rural France as her subject – the Auvergne – believes that what she has in common with Chanel are "a strong spirit, intelligence and pride". But there's also an uncanny physical resemblance that director Anne Fontaine believed was an essential requirement when she was casting.

With her bobbed, and slightly wavy dark hair, light skin, defined cheekbones and tiny frame, Tautou is very convincing as the young Chanel – and even in the later scenes, where, playing older than her own age (she's 32), she fixes hems with a Gitane tentatively dangling from the edge of her lips and has her dainty fingers adorned with heavy gold rings, she couldn't be playing anyone else. There's a steely core to Chanel – the writer Colette described her as a "little black bull" – that her potentially sparrow-like figure would have belied, had she not decked herself out in the armour of such traditionally masculine accoutrements as trousers, tweeds and sailor's hats.

Nevertheless, Tautou insists: "I didn't try to mimic her, but I did try to get close to her in some ways." One way was to study television interviews with her and to read whatever she could, and another was to spend time surrounded by souvenirs of her subject's life.

MANY of the clues to the kind of woman Coco Chanel was lie in the apartment that was her base for more than three decades. It's not often you get the chance to walk in the footsteps of an icon, to sit where she sat and to soak up the atmosphere of the place where she created history, but occasionally the Chanel company will grant visits to the flat on rue Cambon, an unprepossessing street easily missed among the maze of narrow roads that run between the Madeleine and the Place Vendome. There is no better way to try to understand the multi-faceted, contradictory personality of Coco Chanel than to see how she lived.

What's particularly striking about the apartment from which she ruled the fashion world from 1935 until 1971 is that it is in total stylistic contrast with the streamlined, signature Chanel look. Whereas the "public" areas of 31 rue Cambon – the glistening ground floor boutique and the airy, and recently refurbished (by Karl Lagerfeld), first-floor fitting room/salon are full of clean lines, simple shapes and decorated in a typical Chanel palette of beige, black and white, the upstairs apartment is home to heavy antique furniture and intricately patterned antique Chinese screens. The plain mirrors downstairs are nothing like the ornate gilt mirrors that proliferate in the apartment.

And yet, so many staples of the Chanel repertoire originated here: the gold chain belts and bag straps, the baroque necklaces, brooches and cuffs; even the iconic 2.55 bag can be traced back to the interior design. It was inspired not, as Coco Avant Chanel suggests, by the little wallet in which the young Coco kept her sewing needles, but by the "wet sand"-coloured settee in her living room.

Chanel came from an era when it was possible to invent a past for oneself without having to worry too much about snoopers discovering the truth, and she took full advantage of that fact. Although her stories about coming from a well-to-do, old family were known to be fictitious long before she died, she clung to them defiantly: on the mantlepiece in her dining room, there's a marble bust of a rather stern and unattractive-looking man. She claimed he was an ancestor; we now know he wasn't, and that she bought the bust in an antiques shop along with many of the opulent pieces of furniture that she undoubtedly tried to pass off as heirlooms.

Everywhere you turn in the apartment there are reminders of one of Coco Chanel's key personality traits: her superstition. It's no coincidence that her most famous perfume was named after her lucky number – many of her creations, her constellation jewellery for example – bear some reference to the number five. (Or that when the company released its sumptuous new advertising film for the fragrance earlier this summer, it was on 5 May.)

Even Audrey Tautou has begun thinking this way, saying: "The day it was announced that I was the new face of Chanel No 5, which was also on 5 May, I was in New York. The number of my hotel room was 555. Nobody had requested that room for me – I just went into the room that I'd been allocated. And I said to myself that it was very strange."

In the apartment there aren't so many 5-related items but Chanel's zealous superstition, no doubt the result of such an unsettled early life, is represented in just about every corner. On one wall there's a small painting (the single most valuable item in the property – it's by Salvador Dali) of wheat, which, in France is a symbol of luck and of fertility as well as being the slang word for "money". It's a symbol which – along with lions, camels and deer (invariably in pairs) – crops up throughout the apartment, and the Chanel historians believe it relates to the fact that, like many self-made people, Chanel was keenly aware that she had come from nothing, and had no family to bail her out if she ran into difficulties.

Other knick-knacks and ornaments in the apartment testify to Chanel's reputation as someone who, at one point, was rumoured to change lovers every three weeks. Among the mementoes of a colourful love life that spanned several decades (Chanel never married and was a strikingly attractive, youthful-looking woman well into her fifties) are a Russian crucifix given to her by Stravinsky and a handsome cigarette box offered by the Duke of Westminster.

Given Chanel's hectic love life, you'd imagine that the boudoir must have many a tale to tell. But one of the biggest surprises about the apartment is that there is no bedroom: in the 1930s, and then after her return to Paris following her post-war exile in Switzerland, she had a suite at the Ritz where she slept and had her romantic trysts. Each morning, she would nip out the hotel's service entrance (where Dodi and Princess Diana were caught on that famous CCTV footage) on the rue Cambon and cross the road to number 31, where a specially designated assistant would have liberally sprayed No 5 around the staircase so that Chanel would walk into a haze of her signature perfume.

As much as it reflects many aspects of the complex personality of Chanel, the apartment is also just another facade behind which the private, real Coco hid. And as long as the air of mystery and mystique lingers around the woman whom Tautou sums up as "unusual and exceptional", interest in her life, and not just her legacy, will remain strong. sm

n Coco Avant Chanel opens on Friday; Coco and Ivor is scheduled for release later this year. Coco Chanel by Justine Picardie will by published by HarperCollins in October.