Chanelling Coco
We meet Audrey Tautou as she takes on fashion icon Chanel
It’s a sunny April afternoon in London’s chic Soho Hotel and my interview time with Audrey Tautou is up. She asks if I would pose for a photo and, after I agree, pulls out a pocket camera. No high-tech digital device, you understand. Just a good old-fashioned point-and-click Leica. This is not the first time I’ve been snapped by Tautou. When I met her in Paris five years ago for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s war epic A Very Long Engagement, she did the same thing. In fact, she began this tradition shortly after her first collaboration with Jeunet saw her shoot to fame: the 2001 indie surprise hit Amélie.
So where does she keep this photographic collection of motley-looking hacks? In an album? “It’s not in an album but I think I have a few,” she giggles. And does she look back at them, giving journalists marks for style? She looks aghast. “Oh, no! What do you think! It’s just a memory.” In her eyes, it’s a way to counterbalance the “lost hours” spent giving interviews. And being Audrey Tautou, she’s given a lot. “The problem is that now people know I do that, they ask me for something in exchange. So I think it might be the last time I do this.”
Her passion for photography is, however, understandable. For one who has made her name with the moving image, the 32-year-old star owes much to stills. It was her picture on the poster of 1999′s Venus Beauty Institute – the film that won Tautou a Most Promising Actress award at the French César awards – that first caught the eye of Jeunet. His original leading lady – British actress Emily Watson – had just dropped out of Amélie, and he was wondering how to save the picture when he saw Tautou. He was “struck by a pair of dark eyes, a flash of innocence, an unusual demeanour”, just the traits that have captivated audiences ever since.
By the time Amélie was released, you couldn’t turn a street corner in Paris without seeing those dark eyes peering down at you. While tourists flocked to Montmarte, where Tautou’s titular waitress set about doing good deeds for those around her, the French had a new heroine to celebrate. Far more loveable than ice-cold maidens like Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Huppert, Tautou was embraced with such fervour she swiftly became the most adored actress since Brigitte Bardot. Invited to dine with former President Jacques Chirac at the Elysée Palace, she was even sent abroad as a French ambassador for culture.
It was all a bit much for the country girl, who was raised in the provincial town of Montluçon in Allier. So much so, she and her sister went backpacking through Indonesia in the aftermath of Amélie rather than stay in Paris, where she has lived since she was 17. Was she scared? “I was more shocked than scared,” she admits. “It is true I had to give up little freedoms. Like being able to take the subway without being bothered or have people staring at you like you are the star animal at the zoo. That was difficult because it was not something I’d ever wished. But now as time goes by I’m used to it.”
Like Amélie, her latest role is destined to draw the attention of her nation. She plays legendary French designer Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel in Anne Fontaine’s stylish biopic Coco Before Chanel. From ingénue to icon, it’s quite a step but Tautou believes she was “pre-destined” to play the role. This may come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever gazed upon the petite Tautou’s porcelain features, which are rather more delicate than the angular Mademoiselle Chanel’s ever were. But look closer into those saucer-like brown eyes and you’ll see she shares the same fiery spirit that burned in Chanel. As Fontaine says of her actress, “She looks fragile but she’s not. She’s very determined.”

The same is undeniably true of Chanel, who grew up with her sister in an orphanage after her mother died and her father put his children in the care of strict Roman Catholic nuns. As Coco Before Chanel suggests, it was the difficulties endured in her early years that strengthened her resolve. Initially desperate to sing on stage (she gained her nickname after performing the ditty Ko Ko Ri Ko) when her showbiz ambitions failed, she turned to fashion and gradually established herself as the most popular designer in Paris.
Tautou believes she understood the psychology of Chanel, who became just as known for her ruthless streak as for her groundbreaking designs. “Behind the façade that looks so strong, there was some something buried, because to be so strong you have to be hiding something as big as your strength.” Tautou points to Chanel’s desire to lie about her youth – she claimed she was born in 1893, making herself a decade younger than she was – and her poverty-stricken upbringing. “She was so proud, she didn’t want people to say anything. She just wanted to be equal to others. The desire to keep her intimacy and her suffering to herself is what I think makes this character so powerful and mysterious.”
Taking us up to 1919, just a few years after Chanel opened her first store in Paris, the film examines how Chanel flirted with the upper classes, radically remodelling the frou-frou fashions of the belle époque era. “She freed women from the corset,” says Tautou. “She was her own laboratory. She really used clothes to express her desire for independence and freedom. What makes her exceptional was that she was the woman of the moment. She refused to let herself be closed off by social conventions. She was almost a rebel, a feminist ahead of time.”
Wearing a knitted cream jumper and jeans cinched with a leather belt almost as wide as her minuscule waist, Tautou’s casual look is the perfect example of what she means when she says we’re all “descendants” of Chanel’s style. For her own part, though, Tautou does not obsessively hunt out the latest fashions in the boutiques of Paris. “I’m not really bothered by it. I like clothes. But I don’t go shopping very often.”
While that might be a sacrilegious statement at the House of Chanel, it hardly matters. Since completing her role, she recently took over from Nicole Kidman as the ‘face’ of Chanel No. 5, the company’s signature fragrance, appearing in Train de Nuit, a short film that reunited her with Amélie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Stressing it was a “coincidence” that she got the gig, it’s probably just as well Tautou doesn’t live in New York. This changing of the beauty guard was celebrated on 5 May when the city’s Fifth Avenue was renamed Avenue No. 5. What’s more, the luxurious department store Saks Fifth Avenue beamed the advert from all 17 of its display windows.
Such exposure is far removed from Tautou’s decidedly normal childhood. The daughter of a dental surgeon and a teacher, she played the oboe in a youth orchestra and dreamt of studying primates for a living. Acting only came after a friend returned from a drama course, enthusing about it. Her parents then offered her a summer course at the prestigious Cours Florent theatre school in Paris as a reward for getting good grades in her baccalaureate.
It was while she was studying literature at the prestigious Sorbonne, that she announced to her parents she wanted to forge a career in theatre and film. “They were not really happy about that. But they were reassured because I was a good student. They knew if it didn’t work and I failed as an actress, I would resume my studies if I needed to.” Even then superstition prevented her from admitting her desire to act. “I wouldn’t say that to anyone – not even to myself. I’d just let things come and things happen. I’d rather do things than talk about them.”
After Amélie established her, the obvious move was Hollywood but Tautou endeared herself further to the French public by resisting offers. She made her English-language debut in Stephen Frears’s immigrant tale Dirty Pretty Things, but for the most part stayed at home, acting for director Cédric Klapisch in Pot Luck (2002) and Russian Dolls (2005). 
She eventually caved in and took a role opposite Tom Hanks in the 2006 big-screen adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as a cryptologist with an unusual family tree.
Since then, she’s returned to France – playing a golddigger on the French Riviera in Priceless and a lonely cleaning lady in Hunting and Gathering – and claims she’s in no rush to return to America. “To have a project from Hollywood… it doesn’t come from the sky, y’know? I got The Da Vinci Code because there was an audition. If you want to get some project in Hollywood, you have to work for it. I’m not ambitious enough to do the work. I don’t see myself working to exist in this amazing Hollywood world.” She fixes me with a steely gaze. “And I don’t particularly want them to ask me either.”
Doubtless part of this reluctance stems from just how reserved Tautou is. She has made a pact to never to talk about personal matters. “Just because you are famous doesn’t mean you have to talk about your private life,” she explains. “I understand the media’s curiosity but I don’t want to play that game.”
This even extends to her family. When I raise the topic of her sister who worked as a seamstress in the costume department of Coco Before Chanel, she refuses to tell me her name. “The problem is, I’d prefer to ask her before,” she says. “I don’t want to involve her if she doesn’t agree.”
Still, talking to Tautou isn’t like hitting a brick wall. She’s self-deprecating, such as when I ask what kind of girlfriend is she. “All the boys I have known say that I can be a pain!” she smiles. “I have a very strong character and just because I’m a woman, it doesn’t mean I’m going to do what the man wants!”
Does she believe in marriage? “Yes, although it’s not a religion!” she quips. “If you get married, you have to believe in it.” It’s little wonder Tautou felt she was the right woman to play Coco Chanel. They may be separated by the best part of a century but still sound like kindred spirits: career-driven, independent and desperate to succeed. Plus ça change. 
Coco Before Chanel has just opened nationwide
