Karl Lagerfeld , the most prolific fashion designer of the 20th and 21st centuries, was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Biographies contradict one another. His age was a mystery, with reports that he had two birth certificates, one dated 1933 and the other 1938.
Living alone in Paris with a Siamese cat called Choupette, he once declared: “I don’t want to be real in other people’s lives. I want to be an apparition.” Capturing Lagerfeld on screen might therefore seem like pinning down a ghost.
But that did not deter the German-Spanish actor Daniel Brühl who, early in his preparation for playing the revered couturier in a six-part TV series, had an epiphany. What if he conceived of Lagerfeld as a matador in the bullring? Becoming Karl Lagerfeld review – an absolute feast for the eyes Read more “Maybe that’s my half-Spanish side,” Brühl says cheerfully. “I thought, oh, it’s very macho and dominant but also very graceful and feminine at the same time.
That image I kept for the rest of the show. The other actors were laughing at me when sometimes before a take I would do the olé! but it helped me to get into the right tune.” The approach pays off for Brühl in Becoming Karl Lagerfeld , based on Raphaëlle Bacqué’s novel Kaiser Karl.
Set in the 70s, it shows the ambitious outsider trying to break into a world of Paris high fashion where Yves Saint Laurent (played by Arnaud Valois) reigns supreme. Lagerfeld was born into an affluent f.
