"She made up things.” That’s the not entirely encouraging opener to Axel Madson’s 1990 biography of Gabrielle Chanel.

She was so vigilant about kicking over her peasant tracks that she paid off her brothers to “disappear” and went to her grave lumbered with a tombstone that referred to her as Gabrielle Chasnel, since retrieving and correcting the misspelling legally on her birth certificate would have revealed that she was born in the poorhouse.

Perhaps embellishing her history had become a reflex. Maybe she regarded the truth as a bourgeois banal convention.

Not that Chanel’s exhaustive self-invention has ever deterred the biographers. Madson’s is one of numerous Chanel biographies, and also one of the most readable. There have been musicals, most incongruously a Broadway one starring Katharine Hepburn, whose bony frame and patrician outspokeness appealed to Chanel, but failed to engage with audiences. In the autumn, another book will add to the Chanel canon.

Written by Justine Picardie, a former features editor at Vogue, it tantalisingly promises hitherto undiscovered details of her eventful life. In the meantime, there is Coco Before Chanel, the first of several promised Chanel biopics, this one with Audrey Tautou as a — physically at least — convincing Gabrielle.

Actually Anne Fontaine, the writer and director of Coco Before Chanel, stressed that she didn’t want to produce a standard biopic. Since most biopics are plodding, one can sympathise. Presumably that’s why Fontaine focuses on a relatively small chunk of Chanel’s long (1883 to 1971) and extraordinarily eventful life — the years before she became Chanel the celebrity, grand couturier, socialite and one of the 20th century’s first successful businesswomen.