Chirac Tried to Win Da Vinci Role for Friend of His Daughter

President Jacques Chirac reportedly tried to persuade the Oscar-winning director and producer of The Da Vinci Code to give the leading female role to one of his daughter's actor friends.

According to Newsweek, he received Ron Howard and Brian Grazer at the Elysée Palace last December, while they were in Paris seeking permission to film parts of Dan Brown's esoteric blockbuster in the Louvre.

"We thought it was going to be a five-minute thing, like a trip to the Oval Office - a photo and a handshake," Grazer told Newsweek. Over coffee in what became an hour-long visit to the palace, the president reportedly suggested that they cast his daughter Claude's unnamed but closest friend - described as "an actress of some renown in France" - as Sophie Neveu, the young French cryptographer who helps the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon expose what the publishers modestly call "the greatest conspiracy of the past 2000 years".

And he "wondered aloud, half seriously, if they could sweeten the paycheck for actor Jean Reno, who had already been cast as the relentless French detective Bezu Fache", Newsweek said.

Howard said: "That was hilarious. Fortunately, the deal was already closed."

An Elysée Palace spokeswoman yesterday confirmed that the film-makers had visited late last year but - perhaps wisely, given that Claude Chirac is her father's PR adviser - declined to say what had been discussed. Newsweek said the role had long been promised to Audrey Tautou, the star of the whimsical 2001 French smash Amélie.

The report is not the US news weekly's first run-in with Mr Chirac. In May, the magazine marked his 40 years in politics (including 10 years as president) with a highly unflattering portrait in which it compared him to an ageing sumo wrestler and a living fossil. "The public is weary of his bobbing and weaving, and deeply wary of his promises," Newsweek said.