Anna Mouglalis, Actress

Anna Mouglalis is an accomplished actress renowned for her turn as Simone de Beauvoir in Les Amants du Flore and for being the face of Chanel’s luxury jewellery range. She brings something of the existential outsider to her portrayal of Coco Chanel in the startlingly dark art-house biopic Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky: a tale of passion, power and sexual obsession that could not be further in mood from its linear predecessor Coco Before Chanel. Here, Mouglalis talks to John-Paul Pryor about taking on the role of fashion’s most-loved rebel, and what initially attracted Chanel to the avante-garde composer at the riot-inducing Paris debut of The Rite of Spring.

Anna Mouglalis: At the performance, Chanel is seduced by the taste of scandal, because it’s exactly what she was doing, too – she was provoking some sort of scandal in the way that she dressed, and she loved it. I mean, nobody was dressed in black unless they were in mourning, and she was not allowed to be in mourning for her lover, which was a part of her scandal too: she wanted the whole world to be in mourning for him. She was thinking about freeing the movement of women and the choreography of the performance was all about free bodies: it was scandalous, so sexual. And the music was a trance, it was so free, it was outside of all the conventions. It was exactly what she was searching for… They were both outsiders and they were taken by something that was greater than themselves that allowed them to dive; that was the only thing they were searching for, to dive into something.

I have been working for Chanel for eight years now, so in an unconscious way I have been gathering information – I was not expecting that one day somebody would offer me the chance to embody Chanel. She had great humour but she’s a very dark character. There were things even in this movie we couldn’t show. We represent the moment of her death and there are a few anecdotes – she died on a Sunday because she had such a respect for work, and so on – but actually, she had a problem with her wrist and had started to take morphine for the pain. She was doing heroin every day and she died because an air bubble went to her heart. I thought that would have been great to show because she died in the 70s and it was the great period of rock’n’roll and heroin. It would have been interesting to show that the woman who is now considered as the old conservative is just like a punk.

What was funny about her relationship with Stravinsky is the battle for power: when he says to her that she’s just a shopkeeper, she answers that she’s more powerful than he is, and that she’s more famous. It’s true. She will always be more famous than him. It’s not even a fight about who’s the best artist because she’s not even an artist – she’s an artisan who creates and sells clothes to be free – but she’s better known. The movie would have never existed if it was The Life of Igor Stravinsky, nobody would have put money on it, nobody, nobody… ever.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is out on August 6.

Read our Art Talks interview with Isabelle Huppert here.