After “Coco avant Chanel”, “Saint Laurent” and “Yves Saint Laurent”, “House of Gucci”, the series “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” and the future film dedicated to Karl Lagerfeld, it’s Christian Dior’s turn to have the honors of a biopic.
Elsa Zylberstein is crazy about biopics! After Simone, the journey of the century by Olivier Dahan, in which she played Simone Veil, and the recent announcement of the biopic by Anne Fontaine centered on the affair between Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren, the French actress will produce and play a role in a feature film inspired by the life of Christian Dior.
Member of the jury for the new Impact Prize in Venice, Elsa Zylberstein told the magazine variety that the film was written by Julien Teisseire, creator and screenwriter of the Plan Coeur series.
The film will take place over a decade, from February 1947 to 1957 and will tell the beginnings of the fashion house Christian Dior, thanks to its right arm Raymonde Zehnacker and its love affair with a younger man, Jacques Benita.
More than a fashion film, the biopic will explore the love triangle between Dior, Zehnacker and Benita. Elsa Zylberstein will play Raymonde Zehnacker, a powerful ally of the designer who played an important role in Dior’s rise in the post-war fashion world in Paris. We still don’t know who will play Christian Dior.
The actress and producer, whose mother worked for Christian Dior perfumes for many years, declared in the columns of the American newspaper: “We like to say that behind every successful man there is a woman, and that was also true for Dior.”.
A familiar world
She adds : “Christian Dior was a fiercely private man, so people know very little about him. He was not a flamboyant character like other popular fashion designers or cultural icons, but he was no less fascinating.
bestimage Elsa Zylberstein at the Venice Film Festival
It is a world that is very familiar to me because I grew up there through my mother. Christian Dior was “normal gentleman” and he was not Parisian, he came from Normandy. He was always discreet, but he was also extremely resilient. That’s why his legacy lives on today.”
Elsa Zylberstein is also developing, via her company Sonia Films, a spy thriller about Sylvia Rafael, an Israeli Mossad agent born in South Africa and implicated in the Lillehammer affair, an attempted assassination of Ali Hassan Salameh in 1973.
Died in 1957, at the age of 52 after a heart attack, Christian Dior will also be the subject of the AppleTV+ series The New Look. Ben Mendelsohn (Bloodline, Secret Invasion) plays Christian Dior, Juliette Binoche is Coco Chanel, Maisie Williams plays Catherine Dior while John Malkovich lends his features to Lucien Lelong.