Brigitte Bardot

Dusja73 · May 14, 2011

Dusja73 · May 14, 2011

Meghann · May 14, 2011

October 4, 1960

http://www.topfoto.co.uk

Meghann · May 14, 2011

Brigitte Bardot shown with Gunter Sachs in a Roman restaurant

Meghann · May 14, 2011

http://capitalpictures.photoshelter.com

Meghann · May 14, 2011

Bardot says 'destroyed' by ex-husband's suicide

A picture taken on July 21, 1966 shows French actress Brigitte Bardot and her then-husband Gunter Sachs after arriving in Tahiti for their honeymoon. Bardot said she was devastated and shocked by the weekend suicide of her former husband, German-born billionaire playboy Gunter Sachs.

(AFP/File)

BERLIN (AFP) – French screen idol Brigitte Bardot said Thursday she was devastated and shocked by the weekend suicide of her former husband, German-born billionaire playboy Gunter Sachs.

"I cannot understand what he did. Nobody expected it," Bardot, 76, told German magazine Bunte, saying she had been "literally destroyed" by the news that Sachs took his own life in Switzerland on Saturday aged 78.

She said that although their marriage broke up in 1969 after just three years -- he was the last of her three husbands -- the couple had remained close.

"Gunter -- that was a wonderful period of my life. After we split up he never stopped proving how generous and friendly he was," Bardot said.

"I think Gunter had a special tenderness for me because I never asked him for anything. When we were together I paid my way."

A few hours after meeting her for the first time in 1966 he had a helicopter fly over La Madrague, her villa on the French Riviera, and shower it with hundreds of red roses. They married a few weeks later in Las Vegas.

Sachs, the grandson of the founder of car giant Opel and a billionaire philanthropist and art collector, killed himself at his Swiss chalet due to sickness, his family said Sunday.

Relatives released a suicide note to Swiss media written by the swinging sixties celebrity and photographer in which he explained he took his life because of an illness he dubbed "A".

Sachs had three sons and married a former Swedish model in 1969. He lost his first wife to a medical error in 1958, the same year his father shot and killed himself.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110512/en_af...lesuicidebardot

itavi · May 15, 2011

Meghann · May 15, 2011

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Meghann · May 19, 2011

Meghann · May 19, 2011

Brigitte Bardot - Beyond the Age Bar - By Bill Harry

Brigitte Bardot, now in her Sixties, is one of the most beloved stars cinema has ever produced. An icon of the Sixties, BB rivalled Marilyn Monroe in glamour despite the fact that she turned her back on filmmaking at an early stage in her career.

Brigitte Bardot is arguably the most potent female movie star, after Marilyn Monroe. Her appeal has been imitated for over three decades, with contemporary supermodels such as Claudia Schiffer adopting the Bardot image.

Even now, BB remains a Hollywood icon – despite the fact that she terminated her film career almost 30 years ago. Now she lives, not in Beverly Hills , but in her native France where she works to protect animals and insists on keeping her life private.

In the Sixties, Bardot was regarded as one of the most alluring screen stars – but she lacked confidence in her looks. When she entered films she said, “My nose is a very bad nose. It is not shaped well. When I meet a man, it wrinkles up as though I were sniffing a bowl of milk. My mouth is not a good mouth; the lower lip is heavier and more swollen than the other.”

Director Roger Vadim, who ‘discovered’ Bardot and then married her, recalled coming home to see his wife on her 21st birthday, only to find her in tears in front of a mirror, saying she was ugly and hideous. Years later she still denigrated her features, saying her mouth was too large, her eyes too small, her cheeks too round, adding, “I have never thought I was beautiful, even when I was at the height of my fame.”

Bardot was born in her parent’s apartment in Paris, and was named Brigitte after a doll her mother had when she was a child. Wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and nicknamed Bri-Bri by her family, she attended a private school for young ladies until she was 16. Her French and Latin teacher, Pierre-Marie Quervelle said she was “a terrible student, bottom of the class,” and added, “She won’t go anywhere.”

Brigitte appeared on the front cover of Elle magazine in France on 2 May 1949 when she was only 14, although her mother requested that her name not be used. The initials BB were used for the first time.

French director Marc Allegret spotted the cover and considered she had potential. He instructed his assistant Roger Vadim to write to her parents requesting a screen test. Her parents would have refused, but her grandfather told them, “Going into films will not make her a lost child.”

Vadim arranged a screen test for a projected film called ‘The Laurels Are Cut’, which never got made. But Vadim was convinced of his protégé’s star quality. “Two things struck me about her. First, her style…the way she would walk, move, look at people, sit….She was also, for a little bourgeois, in a certain way very revolutionary. She would approach life, any kind of problem, with a really free mind.”

Vadim and Bardot married in 1952, after which the up-and-coming director got to work on her career, sending her to Rene Simon’s drama school, which led to her finding roles in her first two films.

Brigitte made her film debut in ‘The Norman Hole’ in 1952. “My first film – it was terrible!” she said. Her second film ‘Manina, Girl Without A Veil,’ also in 1952, disappointed her as well. In fact, she decided to get out of films.

She said, “What had I got that no one else had got? Why should I succeed? Millions of girls far better than me have failed.”

What made her persevere was the presence of Vadim. She said, “Vadim changed my mind. Vadim was the only man who was certain I had something special to offer on the screen. I marvelled at his confidence and laughed at his conceit. His trust gave me fresh hope. I would do whatever he told me….I placed myself entirely in his hands.

“We went back to the beginning and he taught me how to speak, how to remember my lines and tried to show me how to act. Love was the driving force. The experience improved and rewarded me.”

Vadim continued shaping BB’s career, determined to make her an international star. The major breakthrough came when he directed her in ‘Et Dieu Crea la Femme’, (And God Created Woman), filmed at a small fishing village, St Tropez. Although the movie was initially a flop in France , it created a sensation abroad and established her name.

But as fame grew, Roger and Brigitte’s private life fell apart. During the filming of ‘And God Created Woman’ she began a relationship with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant, while Vadim moved in with Danish actress Annette Stroyberg who gave birth to his daughter the day after he divorced Bardot.

There were scores of offers to appear in Hollywood films, which Bardot refused, although her name continued to attract headlines – particularly due to her relationships and suicide attempts.

She had initially tried to kill herself at the age of 15, but her mother had a presentiment and returned home early to find her daughter with her head in the gas oven. The day after her 26th birthday she swallowed an entire jar of sleeping pills and cut her wrists – she would have died but a 13-year-old girl found her lying in the garden.

She had a relationship with guitarist Sacha Distel but although she said, “He has brought music into my life,” the relationship didn’t last and in 1959 she married Jacques Charrier, her co-star in ‘Babette Goes To War.’ On 11 January 1960 she gave birth to a boy, Nicolas Jacques Charrier, but when she was divorced in 1962 she allowed her ex-husband to have custody of her son. In 1966 she married millionaire Gunther Sachs and they were divorced in September 1969.

Despite the fact that they had divorced, Vadim continued directing her in several further films, none of which had as much impact as the first. Arguably, apart from ‘And God Created Woman’, her most outstanding films were ‘La Verite, En Cas De Malheur’, based on a Simenon story and co-starring Jean Gabin and ‘Viva Maria.’

Bardot generally expressed dissatisfaction with her film career, threatening to abandon it on several occasions and finally did so in 1973 after completing her 48th film, ‘The Gay and Joyous Story of Colinet.’

“This will be my final film,” she said and retired to St. Tropez, the setting of her first major movie hit, which had become a popular resort due to the film.

Since then, the reclusive star has devoted her time to animal welfare, shunning publicity and refusing all offers to make a comeback.

http://www.retrosellers.com/features84.htm

Meghann · May 19, 2011

Cinema: Confessions of a Femme Fatale

Monday, Jan. 10, 1983

At 48, La Bar dot strips away the legend

Bridgette Bardot has finally found it. Not the perfect man (Mon Dieu, c'est im possible!), but something else that has al ways eluded her: the perfect role. After purring and pouting her way through countless films as the sultry femme fatale who could resist anything but temptation, Bardot has turned herself into another French institution, the wise and slightly world-weary philosophe. Voila! At 48, the sex object has become an d'art.

Each Sunday night for the past three weeks, millions of French viewers have tuned in to a three-part, three-hour documentary in which Bardot bares herself for the first time while keeping her clothes on. Titled Brigitte Bardot Quelle Telle (As She Is), it splices together old photos, newsreel footage and film clips along with Bardot's own reminiscences and observations on the legend of B.B. In her finest performance, the woman of the world reveals an otherworldly quality of wistfulness and sadness.

Bardot recalls her early childhood as the proper jeune fille of an affluent father who once whipped her 50 times. ("I felt like a stranger in my parent's house. That's perhaps why I have had so many houses, houses I have bought myself, to feel at home.") It was Roger Vadim who first saw an international sex symbol in the guise of an ingenue of 15. He became her husband and Svengali. ("I was not used to such handsome men ... I was so shy, a little girl still. I wore white socks and a sophomoric white collar and tie.") In the film And God Created Woman (1956), which he co-wrote and directed, Vadim stripped her of her stockings and everything else, turning her into an international sensation. Over the next 17 years she was to make some 25 films and become France's most ogled export.

Bardot's public life merged with her private life. On-screen and off, she rebelled against straitlaced convention. Continually besieged by the press, she blames journalists for destroying her second marriage, to Actor Jacques Charrier. ("You have no idea of what it was like. We couldn't do anything. Everything was deformed and blown up out of proportion by the press.") The marriage produced Bardot's only child, Nicolas, now 22. But the role of mother proved impossible for her. ("I couldn't bring up Nicolas. I couldn't possibly have looked after a baby. I needed a mother. The mad existence I led, crying all the time.") Bardot's two great hates are photographers and the destruction of wildlife. She attributes her sympathy for the latter to her abhorrence of the former. ("I hate photographers. They don't allow us to live... That's why I can understand wild animals being pursued by men with rifles. Zoom lenses are like weapons.") Today, when she is not campaigning for baby seals, she divides her time between her Saint-Tropez villa and a farm just west of Paris.

In the last installment, Bardot's thoughts turn morbidly moralistic. In a husky whisper, the legacy of a lifetime of Gauloises, she confesses that she thinks about death every day. ("It must be our punishment. And we deserve it. It's the decomposition that gets me. You spend your whole life looking after your body. And then you rot away, like that.") Though her pensees may not rival Pascal's, they do show that Charles de Gaulle was right when he remarked that Brigitte Bardot "possesses a sterling simplicity."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,923283,00.html