Starving to play Coco the villain

STAND back and watch the sparks fly between French actress Juliette Binoche and Great Dane Claes Bang, everyone’s favourite Dracula.

Binoche, 58, will play Coco Chanel in a new Apple TV drama which is about to start shooting in Paris.

Bang, 55, will play her younger Nazi lover, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage. He was the attache to the German embassy in Paris, and the two of them lived in the Ritz during the Nazi occupation of France.

Binoche, left, who complains that she has been ‘ starving’ while preparing for the role, will be the stylish villain of the piece in the series The New Look. The show will focus on her poisonous rivalry with Christian Dior, played by Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn.

They spent a decade as adversaries; the feud ending only with Dior’s death from a heart attack in 1957.

But the series is also going to spool back in time and focus on their contrasting lives during the War.

Chanel, right, was a morphine-addicted anti-Semite, snobbish and openly homophobic. She retired from fashion at the outbreak of war in 1939 and moved into the Ritz with von Dincklage. Documents have since revealed she was a Nazi agent.

Dior spent the War employed by Lucien Lelong, making dresses for the wives of Nazis. And while Chanel prospered under occupation, he was involved with the Resistance.

His adored younger sister Catherine (Maisie Williams) was a decorated hero: arrested, tortured and deported to Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1944. After her release, she rebuilt her life, growing flowers for her brother’s fragrances in Provence. Dior named his floral scent, Miss Dior, in her honour.