Casting the character of Léa proved a unique challenge. The filmmakers knew there were few actresses who had the qualities they were looking for as a woman in her 40s who was naturally beautiful and sensually charismatic. One name, however, was the perfect fit and she had already worked with Stephen Frears and Christipher Hampton - Michelle Pfeiffer, whose haunting performance in Dangerous Liaisons won her her first Academy Award nomination in 1989 and had recently returned to the spotlight with acclaimed turns in Stardust and Hairspray.

“Pfeiffer,” says Frears with characteristic insight, “upsets you. She was upsetting in Dangerous Liaisons – I knew that as soon as I met her – and she’s upsetting in this. She’s unnerving, as though being that beautiful contains its own tragic quality.”

But it was not just her mesmerising screen presence and looks that made her ideal for the part. Her performance captures exactly the spirit of the novel. As producer Bill Kenwright says, “Michelle took a chance doing this. The character could be played in several ways but Michelle’s subtlety and vulnerability is astonishing.”

For her part, Michelle Pfeiffer required very little persuading to board the project. “It was the thought of working again with Stephen and Christopher that appealed so much,” says Pfeiffer. “Really, I’d do anything with Stephen and when I read the script and the novel, I was thrilled to be involved.”

“What I like about Colette’s writing is that Léa is not a cartoon version of what a courtesan of the time would look and behave like,” continues Pfeiffer. “She’s smart, she has a great sense of humour and she’s kind. She’s classy and elegant and she’s also a good person and that’s very unexpected. She’s very happy with her life – the top courtesans like Léa were independently wealthy and very smart businesswomen and travelled among the aristocracy – but then this young beautiful boy Chéri comes into her life and she loses her perspective and falls prey to her heart for the first time in her life. I think she regrets that love has never happened for her but she’s always accepted it happened because of the choices she has made. Perhaps she feels that this was her last chance. We see her grapple with the aging process – she’s over 40 after all – and towards the end of their relationship she can’t deny that she’s getting older and we see her coming to terms with and accepting that.”

Working with Christopher Hampton also proved a powerful draw. “Christopher’s writing is so beautiful – but it’s also unbelievably challenging particularly for Americans. We talk in a flat monotone and Christopher’s writing is dense and wordy and has a very different rhythm to it. I found that breaking it down into iambic really helped in getting the rhythm and cadence right. That Christopher was on set all through the shoot was so comforting for me – Colette’s writing can often be open to interpretation so it was a boon to have him there to discuss the characters’ motivations and thought processes.”

One challenge of the film was Frears’ working methods. “We didn’t rehearse,” she laughs. “We would only rehearse on the day of shooting so it was a really tough process but it’s the way Stephen worked. It got really difficult when the script changed at last minute. You know, I’d spend a long time learning the lines and the rhythm of those lines and then they’d change it right when we got on set! By the end of the shoot, I’d started sending them very polite texts saying, ‘Yes, of course, I know you need to rewrite but could we please have a little more notice!’ But really, working with Stephen was a treat. He’s such a lovely character – he walks around he set like a grumpy old man but he’s funny and smart and it was a joy to work with a director of his calibre.”

The role of Chéri was another challenge. The filmmakers were looking for an actor who could convincingly look 19 years old at the beginning of the film and who could imbue the role of a spoilt, selfish young man with a quality audiences could sympathise with.

Frears auditioned several American actors but it was British newcomer Rupert Friend who convinced as a young man at once virile but sensitive, cocky but vulnerable, a young boy who gradually matures into a man who realises how much his older lover has come to mean to him. He thus becomes another of the long line of budding actors on whom Frears has taken a punt and who have gone on to international stardom, including Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things), Michael Sheen (The Deal), Jack Black (High Fidelity) and Daniel Day-Lewis (My Beautiful Laundrette).

“Chéri is 19 years old when the story stars,” says Friend, “and is carefree, spoilt and untroubled but he’s a callow young man and his mother knows that he needs to learn the qualities that will help him get on – refinement, conversation, etiquette. And Léa has many years of experience and can teach him and not pander to his selfishness. But the relationship changes after six years when Léa finds out about his arranged marriage to Edmée. She feels betrayed when she finds out. And Chéri can’t decide where he wants to be – with Léa or in a conventional marriage which will give him an air of respectability.”

Finding the key to the character provided its own challenges for Friend. “There’s something elusive about Chéri,” he explains. “And there’s also a sense of enormous apathy about him; he’s very passive. That makes it very hard: if you’re trying to find what’s driving someone and the answer is nothing, it makes it much harder to get a handle on the character – harder, but very rewarding when you find it.”

Friend returned to Colette’s original novel when he needed inspiration. “Colette is such a great writer,” says Friend, “She manages to convey something in just one sentence, picking out the one detail you need to see the whole character or the whole scene.”

As for working with such a formidable line-up of talent, Friend says: “I‘d be lying if I didn’t say it was quite frightening acting with Michelle Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates but once the work started they became Madame Peloux and Léa. I had to think of them like that or I wouldn’t get out of bed every morning for shaking! But when you work with actors of that calibre, you’re galvanised into raising your game. And they were so professional and so generous with me.”

If he was intimidated, then Friend certainly didn’t show it. “Rupert is so young but so very smart,” says Pfeiffer. “He was a gentleman all through the shoot, especially during the more challenging scenes, and if he was nervous, he hid it very well.”

Working with Stephen Frears also proved a particular pleasure, he says. “Stephen was perfect for Colette because both have an incredible wit and a love of dry humour. They’re both always looking for a wry angle. Colette paints a world were people are caustic about each other but are fond of each other too. But it’s a world of verbal jousting and where things change in a heartbeat; it’s mercurial. And that’s Stephen too.”

For the role of Chéri’s mother, the filmmakers approached Kathy Bates. The Academy Award-winning actress jumped at the chance to portray the larger-than-life Madame Peloux who has become bitter in middle-age but still remains a comic character because of her catty bitchiness.

Says Stephen Frears: “As soon as Kathy’s name came up, I knew she had the humour to do it. Filmmaking is about assembling a group of people who fit together; you’re trying to get the picture right, so everyone is making the same film. And I knew Kathy would fit.”

It was not just the character of Madame Peloux and the chance to immerse herself in the period that proved such a powerful draw for Bates. It was also working with Stephen Frears

“These courtesans had become very powerful, influential and rich,” she says. “The story is set towards the end of their heyday and, like many of her peers, Madame Peloux is no longer working and so is very money-conscious. She knows she has no way of making a living now except by being smart over her money. It has made her manipulative; she manipulates everything and everyone to her own satisfaction. She uses Léa, with whom she’s always had a fierce rivalry, and her own son to gets what she wants, which is money.”

As Michelle Pfeiffer explains, the relationship between Léa and Madame Peloux is borne more out of necessity than any genuine affection. “However independent these women were, they were also isolated and were inevitably judged by the rest of society. So there’s a kinship between Léa and Mme Peloux because they understand each other’s worlds and what it means to be a courtesan. It’s like any profession – only people who belong to the same profession can truly sympathise with each other. But there’s also a competitive edge to their relationship – probably in the past over men but even now over Chéri. Madame Peloux may have manipulated the entire thing – she wants someone else to take care of her out-of-control son and shoulder the financial burden of looking after him – but I suspect there’s an underlying rivalry over him.”

“Madame Peloux was not a good mother,” continues the actress. “Courtesans in general didn’t like the idea of children because they marked their age. Often they would go off for a year or two with this archduke or that prince and their children were left in the care of friends or servants. So Chéri would have had a very lonely and disjointed childhood. He has drifted a lot, he doesn’t really have any roots and he wouldn’t have known who his father was. I saw him as a bit savage with no allegiances to anyone; a bit of a wild child. He has his freedom but he doesn’t know what to do with it.

“Madame Peloux is worried about him because he’s young and wasting himself in drink and he’s costing her a lot of money. So that’s why she has arranged to pawn him off on Lea so that she can teach him the ways of the world and also pay for his upkeep. It will keep him out of trouble and makes him marriageable and that will confer respectability on him.”

Of course marrying him off means a dowry. “She may give Lea a line about wanting grandchildren but it’s really all about money so she will be comfortable in her dotage even though she wants him to be married, respectable, in love and rich – all the things that were unavailable to her as a young woman of her profession.”

Unlike Léa de Lonval, who has the self-confidence to look towards the future and embraces the novelty of modernity beginning to influence French culture and society, Madame Peloux is still lodged firmly in the past. Unable to come to terms with her faded beauty, she overcompensates by surrounding herself with gaudy clutter that ostentatiously show off her wealth. “Her house is a museum of all the gifts she’s been given over the years, trophies of her lovers,” explains Bates.

It was not just the character of Madame Peloux and the chance to immerse herself in the period that proved such a powerful draw for Bates. It was also working with Stephen Frears.

“I was over the moon when I heard that Stephen would be directing this,” she says. “I had no rehearsal time on this film: the morning I arrived I went for costume fittings and the next day we were shooting! I was really thrown in at the deep end. I like rehearsal and preparing and here I didn’t have a feel for the era or how to move in the clothes. So I really had to trust Stephen to tell me if I had the right tone. But he was right there all the time, just underneath the camera, and he was like a conductor. All I can say is that he’s very unassuming, a lovely, very funny, self-deprecating, unique man. He brought class, intellect, wit and humour – that wry, dry British humour – to the piece. He was so much fun to work and that’s what I get to take away from the set.”

Rounding out the cast are Felicity Jones as Edmée, Chéri’s young wife who pragmatically decides to make a success of her marriage and finds in Chéri someone who understands her background; Iben Hjejle as Edmée’s cold-hearted courtesan mother Marie-Laure; and Anita Pallenberg as a former courtesan and madame of an opium den.

With the cast in place and the final pieces of the financing jigsaw provided by by Aramid Entertainment, Germany’s NRW Filmstiftung and the UK Film Council’s Premiere Fund, the film began shooting in April in Paris and Biarritz before moving to Germany’s MMC Coloneum Studios for interiors. With Tracey Seaward and Andras Hamori on board as producers, the highly acclaimed crew included cinematographer Darius Khondji (Funny Games, Se7en), composer Alexandre Desplat (The Queen, Lust, Caution, Syriana), production designer Alan MacDonald (The Queen, Kinky Boots), costume designer Consolata Boyle (The Queen), hair and make-up designer Daniel Phillips (The Queen, The Edge of Love) and editor Lucia Zucchetti (The Queen).

Read Recretating the Period

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