Post by lizzardqueen on May 17, 2007 18:22:13 GMT -5
Brigitte Bardot has had her clashes and still has them. She has earned a lot of money in her life but she refuses to spend it on other people's status symbols. "I absolutely loath luxury," she says. "It's the only thing I cannot stand." She drives a Minimoke and sits on the floor. She hangs out with people half her age and stays up half the night. She.also hangs out with people twice her age - or thereabouts . She is very fond of certain old people. In such things she is completely irreproachable; though she attracts very little approval. Bardot's life is not her own and though there is nothing new in that for cinema stars, hers is a very particular history. - 1984, Glenys Roberts
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'Brigitte has said that she was so ambitious because she wanted to compensate for her ugliness, but anxiety about her looks, at first intense and painful, degenerated into a habit and a fad or at best a means of provoking reassurance. Vadim remembers her spending hours before the mirror with tears in her eyes until he swore that she was more alluring than any other woman he knew. It was of course, not as unusual as she pretended for a little girl to need glasses; nor was she the only child of her age whose teeth were corrected by a brace.'
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"I wish I had invented sex. Sex in number one." - Brigitte
- - -
Hers is the story of the fall from grace of the middle classes from which she sprang - the middle classes who were traditionally so virtuous and God-fearing and whose expectations for their daughter were chastity, charity and maternity. The middle classes have not forgiven her for exposing them as flesh and blood. Nor have they forgiven her for abandoning them by retiring from public life and apparently refusing to show them what happenes after the liberation movement, which she unwittingly pioneered. - 1984, Glenys Roberts
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She was a dancer before she became an actress
- - -
'Brigitte possesses the kind of personal chemistry that forces the viewer to find deep inside himself everything he either would like to forget or habitually denies.' - Newsweek, on her role in And God Greated Woman
- - -
Brigitte could play the guitar very well.
- - -
Brigitte recorded her first record in 1962.
- - -
As early as 1962, she had started a crusade on French television to introduce the humane killer into the country's slaughterhouses. Brigitte in gingham with a little's girl's headband and a charm bracelet, looking like a vulnerable teenager with tears in her eyes, alternately wielding a stun gun and kneading her knuckles on her lap, spat out her description on how animals' throats were cut in French abattoirs as opposed to the infinitely better system in England and Denmark. "They like to eat meat in those countries too," she wailed, "but they don't torture the animals to do so."
- - -
Brigitte never thought of herself as being pretty enough.
- - -
"She could be full of tenderness and love one moment, the next minute she was low key, apathetic, useless. Then she switched to wild enthusiasm. She can do anything she wants to do. She is a woman of high intelligence, a superb writer who conveys the intensity of her feelings in beautiful, erotic language. She has amazingly shrewd judgement, a very quick grasp of almost any situation. She is often right but she is also lazy and other influences tend to impair or supersede her judgement. Then she can be quite wrong."
- - -
She preferred to walk barefoot whenever she could.
- - -
French teenagers voted BB as their most popular pin-up
Brigitte concluded that it was because she lived like a teenager. "They like me because they sense I will never settle down, that, like them I am completely available." On Shalako she was determined to show it. "She seemed obsessed with the idea that she was ageless," said Kenneth Green, publicity manager of the film, who had coined the idea of the Pekinese profile when he first met her in Doctor at Sea. "A perennial teenager who wanted to show that she could go on dancing, singing and whooping it up all night." She asked the producer, Euan Lloyd, to install a powerful stereo in her suite on the top floor of a new hotel with speakers in every room including the bathrooms. She wanted to give parties every night to anyone who would come - waiters, the local bigwigs, the poor off the street. "She had no fixed rules about whom she befriended," says the producer. "If a shoeshine boy had something she liked, he was her friend."
- - -
James Bond producer Harry Saltzman, who had lost his James Bond to Lloyd, now wantd to poach Bardot for his next Bond girl. Bardot was in fact offered a Bond film but she said no - unless she could play James Bond himself of course.
- - -
David Bailey was sent to Paris to photograph Brigitte. Surprisingly, they established an instant rapprt, thinking and reacting alike in their unorthodox ways. They toured off-beat boutiques to find way-out costumes and spent hours discussing moods and make-up. The result was Bardot in Bailey's "strident view of femininity". But it was rather unfeminine Caraby-style military tunic with thick gold braid that Brigitte wore when she attended a reception given by Presdient de Gaulle at the Elysee. Attracting as much attention as was her escort Gunther Sachs.
- - -
Had her own brand of sunglasses.
- - -
"She may have been portrayed as a beautiful sex object...
...but Brigitte Bardot rules the roost. She kicked out any man she was tired of and invited any man she wanted. She lived like a man in Vadim's films." - Jane Fonda
- - -
Brigitte’s work and life are so closely integrated that some of her films seem an extension of her life and some of her personal pursuits seem to mirror the characters she has portrayed. A sex symbol par excellence, she has, on screen as in life, for better or worse, pushed back the frontiers of permissiveness and helped to break down the barriers of narrow bourgeois morality earning herself a place in contemporary social history. As a result, her private life and loves command as much attention as her career.
- - -
While studying ballet, Brigitte had an offer to model.
- - -
Brigitte says she's never been fascinated by people just because they were famous. She had to identify with her heroes. She identified with James Dean even though he was a man. Dean did have his feminine side, a bird-like quality with his fine features and full lips. He also shared character traits with Bardot. Like her he was branded evil and misunderstood, though both in life and in 'East of Eden', the film she so much admired, he was sincere, passionate and affectionate. He could, it seemed do no right. While 1950s mothers were warning their girls of the dangers of predatory males, Dean's uncanny beauty made girls feel predatory instead, yet it did him no good. Moody and abandoned, he watched at the door of the church on his motorbike while the girl in his life, Pier Angeli, an earlier discovery from the Cannes Film Festival, married someone else.
- - -
Apart from any social symbols she could see in common with the rest of France, for Bardot the actress Dean's death was further proof of the uncanny way life and art have a habit of aping each other in her profession. In 'Rebel Without A Cause' he played a game of "chicken" on the highway and won, in life he played and lost. She couldn't help identifying with him. He was the Warner Brothers' contract player she could so easily have become after her Cannes success; but she turned their contract down.
- - -
Bridgette's seduction
For three or four days Brigitte would prove herself the best platonic friend a man had ever had. They would eat lunch and dinner together, they would go dancing and out on the town, they would giggle and laugh, she would adopt his interests, she would do anything she needed to ensnare him. It was wonderful. Then one night the inevitable happened apparently by mutual consent. It was a brilliant and a natural ploy, reinstating the man's predatory instincts and protecting Brigitte's modest supposedly feminine ones, which had been violated by the first overture. After that the couple had to be inseparable for as long as it lasted.
- - -
Brigitte adopted St Tropez and has since spent most of her summers in a fine house she built for herself, an elusive attraction protected from the curious by high garden walls behind which she relaxes in her favourite attire - no clothes. She was already a celebrity among the celebrities who made the French Riviera their home form home. I remember her in those early days, pursued by photographers, going to see Pablo Picasso at his villa and studio in Cannes where he was at work decorating pottery. It was a memorable encounter, like a reunion although the two had never met before. She seemed to have long inhabited Picasso’s fantasies. As with Gauguin’s work which came to Curd Jurgens’ mind he saw Brigitte, the women in Picasso’s paintings strangely resembled this vibrant, pulsating, natural phenomenon. - Willi Frischauer, 1978
- - -
- - -
'Brigitte has said that she was so ambitious because she wanted to compensate for her ugliness, but anxiety about her looks, at first intense and painful, degenerated into a habit and a fad or at best a means of provoking reassurance. Vadim remembers her spending hours before the mirror with tears in her eyes until he swore that she was more alluring than any other woman he knew. It was of course, not as unusual as she pretended for a little girl to need glasses; nor was she the only child of her age whose teeth were corrected by a brace.'
- - -
"I wish I had invented sex. Sex in number one." - Brigitte
- - -
Hers is the story of the fall from grace of the middle classes from which she sprang - the middle classes who were traditionally so virtuous and God-fearing and whose expectations for their daughter were chastity, charity and maternity. The middle classes have not forgiven her for exposing them as flesh and blood. Nor have they forgiven her for abandoning them by retiring from public life and apparently refusing to show them what happenes after the liberation movement, which she unwittingly pioneered. - 1984, Glenys Roberts
- - -
She was a dancer before she became an actress
- - -
'Brigitte possesses the kind of personal chemistry that forces the viewer to find deep inside himself everything he either would like to forget or habitually denies.' - Newsweek, on her role in And God Greated Woman
- - -
Brigitte could play the guitar very well.
- - -
Brigitte recorded her first record in 1962.
- - -
As early as 1962, she had started a crusade on French television to introduce the humane killer into the country's slaughterhouses. Brigitte in gingham with a little's girl's headband and a charm bracelet, looking like a vulnerable teenager with tears in her eyes, alternately wielding a stun gun and kneading her knuckles on her lap, spat out her description on how animals' throats were cut in French abattoirs as opposed to the infinitely better system in England and Denmark. "They like to eat meat in those countries too," she wailed, "but they don't torture the animals to do so."
- - -
Brigitte never thought of herself as being pretty enough.
- - -
"She could be full of tenderness and love one moment, the next minute she was low key, apathetic, useless. Then she switched to wild enthusiasm. She can do anything she wants to do. She is a woman of high intelligence, a superb writer who conveys the intensity of her feelings in beautiful, erotic language. She has amazingly shrewd judgement, a very quick grasp of almost any situation. She is often right but she is also lazy and other influences tend to impair or supersede her judgement. Then she can be quite wrong."
- - -
She preferred to walk barefoot whenever she could.
- - -
French teenagers voted BB as their most popular pin-up
Brigitte concluded that it was because she lived like a teenager. "They like me because they sense I will never settle down, that, like them I am completely available." On Shalako she was determined to show it. "She seemed obsessed with the idea that she was ageless," said Kenneth Green, publicity manager of the film, who had coined the idea of the Pekinese profile when he first met her in Doctor at Sea. "A perennial teenager who wanted to show that she could go on dancing, singing and whooping it up all night." She asked the producer, Euan Lloyd, to install a powerful stereo in her suite on the top floor of a new hotel with speakers in every room including the bathrooms. She wanted to give parties every night to anyone who would come - waiters, the local bigwigs, the poor off the street. "She had no fixed rules about whom she befriended," says the producer. "If a shoeshine boy had something she liked, he was her friend."
- - -
James Bond producer Harry Saltzman, who had lost his James Bond to Lloyd, now wantd to poach Bardot for his next Bond girl. Bardot was in fact offered a Bond film but she said no - unless she could play James Bond himself of course.
- - -
David Bailey was sent to Paris to photograph Brigitte. Surprisingly, they established an instant rapprt, thinking and reacting alike in their unorthodox ways. They toured off-beat boutiques to find way-out costumes and spent hours discussing moods and make-up. The result was Bardot in Bailey's "strident view of femininity". But it was rather unfeminine Caraby-style military tunic with thick gold braid that Brigitte wore when she attended a reception given by Presdient de Gaulle at the Elysee. Attracting as much attention as was her escort Gunther Sachs.
- - -
Had her own brand of sunglasses.
- - -
"She may have been portrayed as a beautiful sex object...
...but Brigitte Bardot rules the roost. She kicked out any man she was tired of and invited any man she wanted. She lived like a man in Vadim's films." - Jane Fonda
- - -
Brigitte’s work and life are so closely integrated that some of her films seem an extension of her life and some of her personal pursuits seem to mirror the characters she has portrayed. A sex symbol par excellence, she has, on screen as in life, for better or worse, pushed back the frontiers of permissiveness and helped to break down the barriers of narrow bourgeois morality earning herself a place in contemporary social history. As a result, her private life and loves command as much attention as her career.
- - -
While studying ballet, Brigitte had an offer to model.
- - -
Brigitte says she's never been fascinated by people just because they were famous. She had to identify with her heroes. She identified with James Dean even though he was a man. Dean did have his feminine side, a bird-like quality with his fine features and full lips. He also shared character traits with Bardot. Like her he was branded evil and misunderstood, though both in life and in 'East of Eden', the film she so much admired, he was sincere, passionate and affectionate. He could, it seemed do no right. While 1950s mothers were warning their girls of the dangers of predatory males, Dean's uncanny beauty made girls feel predatory instead, yet it did him no good. Moody and abandoned, he watched at the door of the church on his motorbike while the girl in his life, Pier Angeli, an earlier discovery from the Cannes Film Festival, married someone else.
- - -
Apart from any social symbols she could see in common with the rest of France, for Bardot the actress Dean's death was further proof of the uncanny way life and art have a habit of aping each other in her profession. In 'Rebel Without A Cause' he played a game of "chicken" on the highway and won, in life he played and lost. She couldn't help identifying with him. He was the Warner Brothers' contract player she could so easily have become after her Cannes success; but she turned their contract down.
- - -
Bridgette's seduction
For three or four days Brigitte would prove herself the best platonic friend a man had ever had. They would eat lunch and dinner together, they would go dancing and out on the town, they would giggle and laugh, she would adopt his interests, she would do anything she needed to ensnare him. It was wonderful. Then one night the inevitable happened apparently by mutual consent. It was a brilliant and a natural ploy, reinstating the man's predatory instincts and protecting Brigitte's modest supposedly feminine ones, which had been violated by the first overture. After that the couple had to be inseparable for as long as it lasted.
- - -
Brigitte adopted St Tropez and has since spent most of her summers in a fine house she built for herself, an elusive attraction protected from the curious by high garden walls behind which she relaxes in her favourite attire - no clothes. She was already a celebrity among the celebrities who made the French Riviera their home form home. I remember her in those early days, pursued by photographers, going to see Pablo Picasso at his villa and studio in Cannes where he was at work decorating pottery. It was a memorable encounter, like a reunion although the two had never met before. She seemed to have long inhabited Picasso’s fantasies. As with Gauguin’s work which came to Curd Jurgens’ mind he saw Brigitte, the women in Picasso’s paintings strangely resembled this vibrant, pulsating, natural phenomenon. - Willi Frischauer, 1978
- - -
This makes me so sad:
, I find her fascinating and wonderful beyond belief, and misconceived, just like Marilyn, because the woman has brains and a spectacular personality with a lot of depth!
