Coco Chanel was a liar: Audrey Tautou

Audrey Tautou attacked world’s greatest female fashion icon

London: French actress Audrey Tautou has launched a vicious attack on the world’s greatest female fashion icon, Coco Chanel, dubbing her “a liar”.Tautou plays Chanel in a new biopic, which tells the story of how the fashion designer rose from a country orphanage to become an international star by founding her eponymous fashion label.

Chanel, who died at the age of 87, has been accused of collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War, when she lived at the Paris Ritz hotel with a German lover. She was also revealed to have been notoriously anti-Jewish and for having a dislike for homosexuals. “She was a liar, so it’s difficult to know who she was before she became famous and had some success,” the Telegraph quoted Tautou as telling Sky News in an interview. “She didn’t want to talk about her youth, I don’t know why, maybe she was ashamed or maybe she didn’t want people to feel pity for her because she came from a poor family,” she said. The film, Coco Before Chanel, focuses on the early years of Gabrielle Chanel, who was nicknamed Coco during her failed attempt to launch a singing career. It has already been widely criticised for ignoring Chanel’s passionate affair with Hans Gunther von Dincklage during the wartime occupation of Paris, and for underplaying her anti-Semitism and homophobia. Tautou was asked if she had reservations about taking on the role of a national icon. “It’s not scary, but it’s more of a responsibility,” she said. “I didn’t want to betray her. I wanted to have a sense of her character, her personality. “It was more interesting to get as deep as possible in her sensitivity and creation, rather than just giving the main cliché of her life,” she added. ANI