Talented but tortured designer YSL fitting subject of two new films

Ever since Marion Cotillard warbled her way to an Oscar as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose in 2007, French cinema has been tackling the nation's 20th-century icons with gusto. From singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg (in 2010's Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life) to fashion designer Coco Chanel (Coco Before Chanel and Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, both 2009) to filmmaker Jean Renoir (2012's Renoir), the Gallic biopic has been unstoppable of late.

"[It shows] we can do proper biopics with huge ambitions like Americans do," says French actor Pierre Niney, who plays the latest legend to receive this treatment: fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent.

Together with his lover and business partner, Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent turned the YSL house into a global empire; his designs were so revered that he became the first living designer to be honoured by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art with a solo exhibition, in 1983.

"I think he's unique," says director-writer-composer Bertrand Bonello. "I think he's maybe the only one I can say who is not only a fashion designer; he's a real artist."

Bonello is in post-production on Saint Laurent, starring Gaspard Ulliel, best known for playing the young killer Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising, as the designer, and regular Dardenne Brothers actor Jérémie Renier as Bergé.

Before that, however, comes Yves Saint Laurent. Directed by Jalil Lespert, it stars Niney, with his fellow player at French state theatre company La Comédie-Française, Guillaume Gallienne, as Bergé.