BY Julia Llewellyn Smith | 29 October 2006
The actress Anna Mouglalis speaks five languages, keeps philosophy books by her bed and loathes fashion-industry falsities - none of which has stopped her becoming the new face of Chanel. Julia Llewellyn Smith meets Karl Lagerfeld's least likely muse
Anna Mouglalis and I are sitting in the back of a black limousine, which is carrying us through Paris from our starting point - a hotel in the haute-bourgeois eighth arrondissement - to her neighbourhood, the bohemian quartier Latin.
En route, we pass pretty much every symbol of the City of Lights: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, the Seine.
There couldn't be a more fitting backdrop to a conversation with Mouglalis, the current face of Chanel. You may not know her name, but you will certainly have seen her feline eyes and bed-head hair in glossy magazines and on billboards.
Four years ago Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel's chief designer, surprised the fashion world (and Mouglalis herself) by naming the virtually unknown actress his latest muse. 'She is Ava Gardner and Anna Magnani rolled into one,' he said.
An 89-year-old institution, Chanel women, who in the past have included Vanessa Paradis and Inès de la Fressange, are haughty, fine-boned creatures, whose impossible sophistication embodies the spirit of Paris.
However, it's not just Mouglalis's dramatic beauty that makes her stand out. There's also her voice: obscenely deep and scratchy, like molasses mixed with nails, and almost certainly the first voice to inspire a fragrance - Allure Sensuelle, which Chanel's renowned 'nose', Jacques Polge, created to be the 'scent of a great seductress'.
All in all, Mouglalis, 28, sounds like the epitome of the intimidating Parisienne and I suspect she'll be hard work. My fears are confirmed when I arrive at the hotel where the Stella shoot is just finishing. The photographer and team greet me cheerily; the willowy Mouglalis nods icily. She is now dressed in her 'own clothes', which - given her unlimited access to Lagerfeld's atelier - means an all-black ensemble of Chanel jeans, boots, silk blouse and cardigan that appear to have been casually flung together, but achieve a ravishing (as opposed to scruffy) effect.
Having finished, she eyes me warily and I brace myself for her to announce the interview's off. 'Do we have to talk here?' she asks tentatively in her excellent, Americanised English. When I say no, she visibly relaxes. 'Do you mind if we talk in my car and then in a café near my house? I'm just in such a hurry, I'm moving house at eight tomorrow morning and there's so much to do.'
She kisses the photographer's team and, while doing so, makes a passing remark in French about how she's three months pregnant. She doesn't realise I've understood.
Which means that there is a figurative elephant in the limo with us, as I wait to see if she'll mention the pregnancy.
Instead, Mouglalis wants to talk about the film she is here to publicise, Romanzo Criminale, a gangster movie with definite echoes of Goodfellas, which has been a huge hit in Italy, where it was made. Mouglalis plays a prostitute and is a mesmeric screen presence, although I'm disappointed to learn her part was dubbed (I had been marvelling at her perfect Italian).
So far Mouglalis's acting career has been low key, with a CV consisting of obscure European films. Yet she is adamant that she is an actress, not a model. 'It is as an actress that I work for Chanel,' she insists in her phone-sex purr. 'I'm not the most beautiful girl in the world. If that was what they were looking for, they wouldn't have chosen me. I'm not the type that is fashionable at the moment.'
Does she mean the skinny, Californian, Nicole Richie type? Mouglalis nods. 'Chanel didn't ask me to be anaemic. They asked me to embody their spirit, in a poetic sense. That house is so full of history, the Coco Chanel character is still so important. She really did a lot for women; her aim was never to show them as an object of desire. She gave women pockets and put them in trousers, at a time when they were still wearing long skirts. She believed that she wanted the person to wear the dress, not the dress to wear the person and even Karl's most amazing dress doesn't make a person disappear - it makes that person bigger.'
Mouglalis does just two weeks of lucrative work a year for Chanel; the rest of the time she is free to pursue art-house projects, regardless of how little they pay.
'The shrine of Chanel is much bigger than the shrine of the movies I have been doing, but the movies I've been doing are trying different forms. I'm not saying that I don't want them to succeed but, thanks to Chanel, I don't have to run after big productions to make money.' She rolls her eyes to express her awe, as she adds, 'It's a very big luck.'
I warm to Mouglalis because she is so touchingly aware of her good fortune. She is certainly no diva, asking me politely about my journey and shaking hands cordially with the limo driver when he drops us off outside her favourite café opposite the Jardins du Luxembourg, where she strides to a corner table, oblivious to swivelling heads and dropping jaws.
She orders a coffee and talks about Lagerfeld, her voice hushed in gratitude. They met four years ago, after he spotted her in her first (and probably most high-profile) film, Claude Chabrol's Merci pour le Chocolat, and invited her to take part in a shoot of French actors and actresses he was conducting for an American magazine.
'We were supposed to do just one picture, but we did maybe eight and stayed until very late,' she recalls. He lent her clothes for her first Cannes film festival and then offered to dress her in couture for her next three films.
'The costumes were so luxurious, their shine picked up the light so much, it gave a mythological dimension to what we were doing. I felt it was like reviving an ancient practice - after the war, actresses were loyal to a designer who dressed them on screen and in life.' Although she claims to have no interest in trends and never to go shopping, she admits to having grown dangerously fond of couture. 'The voluptuous feeling of putting it on,' she sighs dreamily. 'It's like an all-day caress.'
Her background is not so glamorous. Mouglalis was born in 'nice but boring' Nantes, in Brittany, her father a doctor, her mother a masseuse. Liberal souls, they were happy to let their daughter leave her local school before her 16th birthday to follow her boyfriend to Paris, where she studied for her baccalaureate in literature and philosophy, getting good grades. Although her school friends always saw the point of her baritone ('They would get me to call their parents pretending to be my mother and say they were staying at my house'), tutors at her drama school were less impressed.
'They told me my voice was not matching my physique at all, that I had the face of a girl but the voice of an old woman and I would never work,' she says indignantly. 'They said I should get an operation to make it higher.' The Byzantine eyes roll incredulously at the memory. 'I said: "Are you crazy?" There was no way! It was as if I was a machine!'
I tell her that the latest thing in Hollywood is voice lifts, so your vocal chords can sound as fresh as your carefully tweaked face. Mouglalis gives a dismissive Gallic shrug.
'Hollywood is crazy. When I was a student I did a little bit of modelling and they told me they wanted to change my teeth to make them perfect.' She points at a tiny pock mark on her forehead. 'They wanted me to put skin in this little hole. I mean, the craziness of having an operation to change yourself! I think I'm never going to do that. It means you don't like yourself and you become an object of consumption.'
With such views, it's no wonder Mouglalis loathed her brief stint as a teenage model. 'I was so bad you can't imagine!' she cries. 'And I quit very quickly because I was not enjoying it at all. For your castings they would look at your book instead of looking at you.
I couldn't stand that. I wanted to talk and make jokes.' Her greatest fear is clearly to be dismissed as an airhead - in a very French way she makes it plain that there are piles of philosophy books next to her bed rather than old Vogues and that, besides French, she can speak English, Italian, Spanish and a little of her father's native Greek.
No wonder she impressed Lagerfeld, famously a man who does not suffer fools. 'With Karl, modelling is different. Then I love it, because he's bringing me books and telling me stories. Karl is a real inspiration. He's more than an inspiration, he gives me strength. I have never seen someone so alive as him and I was so amazed he could give me that attention, it gave me confidence. My only concern is for him to respect what I do. Because of Karl I never want to bullshit.'
She goes on to chat about plans for the future - to direct her own film, to record a CD. She is also wrapping a film, whose director, the Frenchman Samuel Benchetrit, also happens to be her fiancé and the father of her - still unmentioned - unborn child. As she talks about the film, she remembers with a start that they are moving tomorrow, to the nearby district of St-Germain des Prés, so she really must get back to her packing.
Seeing my last chance, I ask her to confirm the pregnancy. Uncomfortably, she says it's true and she's very happy and so are Chanel, but she doesn't want to go into any detail. For the next five minutes, we have a girly chat about weight gain and epidurals. As she gets up, she asks solicitously, 'Will you be OK? How long until your train? The Jardins du Luxembourg are over there if you want to take a walk. And the RER station's on the corner. Only three stops to the Gare du Nord.' She may be a limo regular, but what's extraordinary about Anna Mouglalis is how very ordinary she has remained.
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