Audrey Tautou is Coco Chanel

Now that Chanel No. 5 and Coco Chanel herself agree with me that Audrey Tautou is one of the most beautiful actresses around, I thought it was due time for a little ode to Audrey.

Audrey Tautou and French Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.Photo Credit: Emanuele Scorcelletti for CHANEL .

Not only is Tautou the new face of Chanel No. 5 but she is actually going to play Coco Chanel in a new French film. Who else could possibly pull off playing Coco Chanel? French director Anne Fontaine has chosen Tautou to animate the life of Coco Chanel before she was famous. "I wanted to follow the interior path of this young woman who was poor, without education, but who had an uncommon personality that was ahead of her time," Fontaine explains. It is my hunch that Tautou can play this role because it is her own uncommon personality that animates her beauty and grace. Tautou’s look is quintessentially French - simple and elegant. The goal of her makeup is to accentuate but remain mostly invisible.

Audrey Tautou came to us as Amelie. A character and a movie so telling of the human condition and captive of our collective imagination that even my toughest ice-hockey playing, burly, Wisconsinite mountain man friends own and watch on a fairly regular basis. Her grace, her demeanor, her unbelievable ability to in one moment embody the je ne sais quois of all beauty legends past and present, leaves me speechless (only momentarily of course because I am in fact a writer.)

In the age of the Hills, she is a breathing in of spirit, which is after all the definition of in-spir-ation. Perhaps true, old-Hollywood actresses are not gone forever – just temporarily blurred out by the bright lights of fame burning so fast for the likes of today’s teeny-bopper divas. Tautou is different. She is, at the young age of 32, a classic.