She was the woman who defined style and ruled over Parisian haute couture for nearly six decades, inventing French chic with her little black dress, famous suit and turtleneck sweaters.

Now, 26 years after Coco Chanel’s death, three rival films are being made about the designer’s life, it emerged at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday.

One involves Christopher Hampton, Oscar-winning film-maker and one of Britain’s foremost writer-directors. He is fresh from finishing the screen-play for Atonement, adapted from Ian McEwan’s novel and starring Keira Knightley, and is working on a script about Chanel with the French director Anne Fontaine.

Audrey Tautou, the French star of Amélie and The Da Vinci Code, will play Chanel. Hampton says that she bears a striking resemblance to her. He is involved in a $15 million (£7.5 million) production that focuses on the early years of Gabrielle Chanel (1883-1971) – her childhood, early womanhood, and the people who shaped her.

It will show how she was born into poverty, the illegitimate daughter of a travelling salesman, and how her dream had been to be a cabaret singer. It was in a Roman Catholic orphanage, where she was abandoned by her father after her mother’s death, that she learnt to sew.

She opened a millinery shop in Deauville in 1913. Her designs, which emphasised simplicity and comfort, revolutionised the fashion industry for the next 30 years. Costume pearls, the bouclé suit and No 5 perfume were among the enduring Chanel elements.

One of the rival productions, Coco & Igor, is based on a book published in 2002 by Chris Greenhalgh. It will star Marina Hands. The subject is an unexpected choice for its director, William Friedkin, whose previous films include The Exorcist and The French Connection.

The third film involves Danièle Thompson, director of the French comedy Fauteuils d’orchestre, retitled in the English-language market as Orchestra Seats or Avenue Montaigne.

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