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Post by Nel on Jul 25, 2007 23:12:33 GMT -5
Ahh man, I wish my library had that book, it sounds so good!
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Post by lizzardqueen on Jul 26, 2007 17:12:54 GMT -5
Ahh man, I wish my library had that book, it sounds so good! Ditto. Big time. I'm gonna scount online
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Post by lizzardqueen on Jul 26, 2007 17:19:43 GMT -5
Brigitte had stooped going to school and was now taking courses privately so that she could devote more time to her dance lessons. Sometimes I went along to her ballet class at the Studio Walker, and I was amazed by her graceful, sylphlike performance. She gave herself, body and soul, to her art. I have never seen her so perfectly in harmony with herself on a stage or in front of the camera. If she hadn't decided to give up dancing, she would certainly have become one of the greatest ballerinas of her time. - Roger Vadim, 1986 - - - "She has always had the most wonderful walk in the world," Andre Pousse maintains. "When she walks by, everyone stops to look. Even now. And that has nothing to do with the fact that they're looking at Brigitte Bardot. She could be absolutely nobody and they'd still look. That's her dancer's training. Everything about her is perfect when she walks." French movie star Jeanne Moreau agrees. "Just watching her walk was just like listening to great music." In an odd way, that's presented some unique problems for Bardot. To avoid crowds, she's gone throgh entire wardrobes of disguises. She's put on wigs and scarves and donned huge glasses to mask her face. But the minute she starts to walk, the instant she takes two steps, crowds of fans and the paparazzi could always tell it was her. - - - "Watching her walk was like listening to great music" - Moreau - - - On the set, 'Vie Privee' - 1960 The story was about Brigitte. "It was too close to who I was," she told friends when it was over. "A certain prudishness held me back. And at the same time it showed the hell that was my life in those days." In one scene her character - Jill - comes home after a long night, at 5 or 6 in the morning, and gets into the lift to go upstairs to her apartment. A cleaning woman gets in the lift with her, and as the lift climbs, all you hear is the cleaning woman insulting Jill. This was Malle's version of a true incident. Brigitte had been visiting a friend in a hospital and got stuck in an elevator with a nurse. Unprovoked and without any warning, the nurse suddenly took a fork off a tray and stabbed Brigitte several times. The nurse kept screaming that her son was in the army, fighting in North Africa, while Brigitte was at home, making millions for stripping. Brigitte was understandably terrified. She still has small scars on her arms from that day.
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Post by lizzardqueen on Jul 26, 2007 17:21:42 GMT -5
Brigitte appeared - shades of Marlene Dietrich - in trousers and a man's morning coat with a camellia in her button hole, a diamond pin in her cravat and with a top hat peched on her locks. Piquantly biting her lip like a shy schoolgirl giving a recital, she strummed a mandolin and sang 'On the sunny side of the street...'. then joined the famous Freres Jacques act in a comic routine. Presenting her alter ego in the next act, she wore a strip-tease costume and a black wig and sang a few risque chasons with such refrains as "I invite you to be immoral" and "I give myself to the one I like". Altogether she changed costumes eight times in a quarter of an hour. Then she wished all and sundry a happy New Year. Viewers seemed to like what they saw but the press was critical of her singing voice. BB performs 'On the Sunny Side of the Street'
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Post by lizzardqueen on Jul 26, 2007 17:24:33 GMT -5
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Post by lizzardqueen on Jul 26, 2007 17:30:43 GMT -5
When Brigitte and Charrier were divorced when young Nicolas was only two, she allowed the father to keep custody of the child. "I was just a child myself. I couldn't look after myself even, I was not good for anyone else. I needed a mother, a support, a shoulder to cry on. I needed roots. I couldn't give anyone else roots if I was completely rootless myself. I was unbalanced, lost and I couldn't' lean on a little newborn baby. I would have made his life hell. I spent all my time in tears and I went out with anybody and everybody anywhere just to get out when I felt the walls closing round me. I don't care what anybody else thought. I felt I was in prison and that was no life for a child." The whole period took the most terrible and nearly fatal toll of her for the strong whiff of self-disgust was accompanied by the overwhelming disapproval of others. "I think it was at that time that France really turned against Brigitte", said a friend. - - - "First the walk. Never again have I seen such a walk. As if she was carrying a basket of fruit on her head. The long neck surging up from the collar bone like a question mark. The features, the cheek-bones, the big, over-full mouth might belong to a coloured girl - like a trick picture Gaugiun might have painted in Tahiti after walking from a dream of the Bretagne. For the skin is light, the hair blonde as wheat. How does she manage to be so attentive when her whole demeanour seems to say: 'These people talking - what's it to do with me? Let me go back to my cosy bed or the sun and the beach!' She is tall, taller than most of the men who stop and stare..." - Curt Jurgens, actor - - - "She wears people out," declares Alain Carre, who lived through this period as her secretary and hief confidant. "She is impulsive. She has also always been someone who can easily hurt people when she's angry. She's never been one to love from afar. A man can never leave her on her own. Brigitte needs someone with her day and night." - - - BB was said to be volatile and obsessive. - - - In the film 'Heaven Fell That Night' there is a donkey. Having graduated from those youthful days when she owned one cat or one rabbit or one dog to beginning a small menagerie by picking up strays along the way - and given Brigitte's life-long penchant for making friends with every animal within 100 miles of every film set - it's hardly surprising that she would have adopted the donkey. She named him Romeo and, when the hotel where she was staying refused to allow her to keep it in their garage, she brought it up to her room. But not all of the animals on the set fared as well. There was a cow in the picture and, to sedate it, a Spanish vet gave it a dose of anaesthesia. The animal reacted to it and there was nothing anyone could do. It died with Brigitte kneeling next to it. Ever since she has actively compaigned against the use of animals in spectales.
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Post by lizzardqueen on Jul 26, 2007 17:42:19 GMT -5
Roger Vadim used to watch her scrutinise her face in the mirror for hours and hours, saw her getting more and more distressed. There were tears in her eyes as she examined her features - her mouth with the "swollen lower lip" was not good, her nose tended to wrinkle up, nothing was right. - - - Her closest friends, those who knew her as a little girl of fifteen studying classical dancing in Paris and never dreaming of a movie career, describe her as she was then, "an adorable, ravishingly beautiful child, simple and mischievous and charming." And then they add wistfully, "How different she'd be today if it hadn't been for Vadim!" - - - Crowds started to gather outside the Westbury Hotel where she was staying. It was late October and it was late afternoon before she dared leave the hotel a couple hours later than scheduled. By this time the home-going crowds had built up still further in Mayfair. Hampstead, where she was due to start shooting. Traffic ground to a halt as her limousine arrived in the narrow street and an impromptu signing session was set up on the pavement. Finally the police arrived and ordered the director to stop shooting. Before leaving London, Brigitte held a press conference. "I never thought it could happen. In Italy, yes, but not London. I have never known anything quite like it before. It was frightening. I can never say the English are unemotional again. But why, why me?" - - - The girl in the raincoat caught the photographers' eyes. The raincoat slipped from her shoulders. She emerged in a tight-fitting teenager's dress and with a toss of her head sent her ponytail flying. There was a second of silence, just enough for the electric charge to pass between the crowd of males and the figure in the floodlight. Then the 'Midway' was engulfed in a single shot of lightening and a crash of thunder: thousands of flashbulbs and shourt of admiration that exceeded in volume all the previous acclaims put together. - Raymond Cartier, Paris-Match reporter - - - Brigitte said she loved the idea of starring with Jeanne Moreau. "Perhaps you might say we are two aspects of the ideal woman. I hardly knew her untl the film was proposed, then we dined together, listened to songs together and we hit it off immediately. It is the first tme I have accepted to play with another star of the first rank. We will have exactly the same billing and that pleses me - it is such a change." Moreau too sounded quite confident: "Films have never shown the kind of relationship that can exist between two women. Men like to think that women must be constantly jealous of each other, never trusting, never in rapport. That is not true of course and certainly not today." However, it took three or four weeks for Jeanne to become quite nervous of Brigitte as an opponent. "She was quite hostile to Viva Maria for a long time in fact. She refused to have anything to do with the publicity and thought she would rehabilitate herself by making a couple of intellectual pictures."
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Post by lizzardqueen on Jul 26, 2007 17:57:24 GMT -5
It is said that Mary Quant got her inspiration from Brigitte's beautifull legs to create the mini-skirt. - - - Shalako put Brigitte on the same screen as Sean Connery. Years before, she'd been offered a role in a James Bond movie. She turned it down. When this project came along, she and Gunther went to meet Connery in Deauville. They got along and everyone hoped for the best. It turned out to be a mistake. "If I had been offered better scripts throughout my career," she explained, in an interview 10 years after the fact, "maybe I would have made fewer mistakes in my career. But that's boring for me to talk about because everybody knows about them. For Shalako, I wanted to try my luck speaking English. So I tried. If nothing else, I learned English. It always comes in handy." - - - Filming 'Shalako' While she did the minimum amount of work on the set she posed for the maximum of press photographs. She knew exactly what the photographers wanted. She messed her hair, hitched her skirts and patted the horses, although several people thought she didn't really like horses. And through it all she talked about Gunther. She seemed obsessed with him. "Love is the most important thing in my life," she siad, "but it's not top of Gunther's list. He likes going out, parties, friends. He is beautiful, seductive, and all the women want him. but that means there must be a contest between us. He doesn't want to change his life for me and I don't want to change mine for him." - - - Brigitte: "To me being blonde meant living my life for men, being a sex-symbol all of the time, a symbol of carefree, young France. I enjoyed it, but the blonde hair blinded men to the real person underneath. I'm taken more seriously now, and sexually, I please myself more. I ask much more from men - in part because of my new identity and because times have changed. But men still want old-fashiioned girlfriends, so blondes are popular all over gain. Before I was one of the few top blondes; now there are so many imitations. It is flattering but I have outgrown it." - - - "She was born with this ego. The same way she was born with that beauty of hers. No one can change that. It's not something that happened because of her parents or society. If she'd been born 200 years before or 600 years later, she would have been like that. It's aso totally logical from her point of view, for someone who so desperately needs to be loved and can't find it with the human race, to look for it with her animals. They compensate her for that. Everthing she does is intuitive. She's never thought it out. But if you look closely at her desire to save animals, to cater to them, to surround herself with them, I think it's fair to say you'll see a frightening degree of loneliness, and that stems directly from her egoism." - Roger Vadim
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Post by Nel on Jul 31, 2007 2:16:16 GMT -5
Awesome stuff Lizzardqueen, I just love it! Brigitte is truly fascinating. I'm going to see Shalako soon actually, taped it off the telly and can't wait to watch even if it's not that great lol, because it's Brigitte!
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Post by ChildOfTheMoon on Aug 6, 2007 6:39:03 GMT -5
Awesome stuff Lizzardqueen, I just love it! Brigitte is truly fascinating. I'm going to see Shalako soon actually, taped it off the telly and can't wait to watch even if it's not that great lol, because it's Brigitte! I even own the dvd; terribly boring but B.B. looks stunning in it! ;D
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Post by Nel on Aug 7, 2007 22:07:04 GMT -5
Lol Wow, cool! I agree, I just fast-forward to all the parts with her in it. I'd love to own a Brigitte movie (or at least see one)
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Post by lizzardqueen on Aug 8, 2007 8:29:21 GMT -5
Viva! Maria was when I fell in love with her! See it see it see it! It's just so damn superb!
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Post by alicia on Aug 27, 2007 13:00:36 GMT -5
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Post by upanishad on Dec 30, 2007 18:12:54 GMT -5
I read that lobster is a favorite dish of Brigitte. Is it not ironic for someone who makes such a production of her love of animals and their rights? Lobsters die in a particularly grisly way. I saw it taking place long ago at Fishermans Wharf in San Francisco. People hide behind the belief that their nervous systems are primitive and they die quickly, and these things are probably true. Of course, all of us who are not total vegetarians hide from what happens in slaughterhouses. I have also glimpsed and heard pigs going to a frantically driven fate.
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Post by Nel on Jan 14, 2008 1:25:59 GMT -5
^ That's very sad but interesting to think about. BB seems so utterly passionate about animal rights, I can't imagine she would eat lobster knowing how they die, but I suppose it's hard to know. Viva! Maria was when I fell in love with her! See it see it see it! It's just so damn superb! Oh I certainly do want to see it, not only for BB but I'm quite curious to see what Jeanne Moreau's like too Ahahaha I've seen the music video for that, isn't it hilarious? I really adore her music and her videos. C'est Rigolo is probably my favourite video, it's so crazy and energetic and fun.
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