Chanel’s Nazi past left out of new Audrey Tautou film

Audrey Tautou, one of the darlings of the French cinema since her appearance in the 2001 hit film Amelie, opens in cinemas across France today in an new film about the iconic French designer Coco Chanel. However, Coco Avant Chanel stops short of depicting an aspect of the pioneering couturier the French would rather forget – that she was a renowned Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite.

The Coco Chanel story is one of France's favourite fairytales. Abandoned by her father and with her mother dead, Gabrielle Chanel - her real name - was brought up by nuns who taught her to sew. From those humble beginnings she grew to become one of the world's best loved designers - famed for tailoring men's fashion to women's needs, inventing the little black dress and introducing round-necked jackets and quilted handbags to wardrobes around the world.

However, there is a darker side to her story. It was often said that she was prepared to sleep with the right people to get ahead and, after the Germans occupied France in 1940, Chanel conducted an affair with the Nazi officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage at Paris’s Ritz hotel, thus becoming one of France's notorious "horizontal collaborators".

In his book, 1940-1945 Annees Erotiques, the French historian Patrick Buisson details how some of his country's best-loved icons disgraced themselves during the war. "Coco Chanel or the actress Arletty [star of Les Enfants du Paradis] were the incarnation of the values of France: insolence, freedom and in Chanel's case elegance," Buisson told the Guardian. "In their own way, each was an icon. The fact that they could fall for the occupier was not just a transgression, it was damaging for the national conscience.”

Similar sentiments are expressed by Carmen Callil in her recent book Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France where Chanel is described as "indomitably anti-Semitic". Chanel even tried to use the law banning Jews from owning businesses to wrest control of her perfume business from the Wertheimer family: she failed and the Wertheimers own House of Chanel, along with various vineyards, to this day.

Such was Chanel's collusion with the Nazis that at one point after the war she was arrested and charged with war crimes before being mysteriously released.

None of this, however, is dealt with in French director Anne Fontaine's new film which, as the title suggests, deals with her early years when she tried to be a singer - hence the nickname Coco - and battled her way into the fashion business.

Tautou, who is taking over from Nicole Kidman as the face of Chanel No. 5, has said of Chanel: "She was a very hard, very authoritarian, very proud character and at the same time, this was a period of her life when her character wasn't entirely formed." That's one way of putting it.