Roger Vadim

Biography: life and films

Could the sexual revolution in French cinema have taken place without Roger Vadim? Probably, but it would almost certainly have been more leisurely and discrete affair, not the seismic event that his debut feature Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956) was to unleash on an unsuspecting world. To some, Vadim personifies all that is shallow and exploitative in the objectification of women in cinema, a man whose filmography has the character of a harem, richly stocked with succulent pulchritude of the most lurid and soulless kind. To others, Vadim was a revolutionary, someone who played a crucial part in exorcising out-dated moral values from cinema and revitalising it just as television was on the brink of making it a cultural irrelevance. Love him or hate him, Roger Vadim was not someone the popular press could easily overlook, particularly as he managed to lure some of the most beautiful women in the world into his own private harem.

As you might expect for such a flamboyant personality, Roger Vadim was born into a very privileged family, the son of a Russian diplomat of aristocratic origin and a French woman from Marseille. Christened Roger Vladimir Plemiannikov, he was born in Paris on 26th January 1928 and spent most of his childhood living in the lap of luxury in foreign climes, mainly Egypt and Turkey. He was ten when his father died suddenly, necessitating a return to France, where his mother found work managing a hostel in the French Alps.

Young Roger planned to follow in his father's footsteps and enrolled in a course for political studies in Paris. In 1947, aged 19, he decided that he would rather be an actor than a diplomat, and so he took drama lessons under Charles Dullin before starting to tread the boards at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. It was through the writer André Gide that Vadim met the film director Marc Allégret, who gave him his first break as an assistant director and screenwriter, on such films as Blanche Fury (1948) and Maria Chapdelaine (1950). Allégret also cast the young Vadim in some of his films, most notably Futures vedettes (1955).

In 1950, noticing an unknown 15-year-old girl on the cover of Elle magazine, Vadim persuaded Allégret to give her a screen test with a view to using her in his next film. Allégret interviewed the girl but quickly decided she had no future as an actress. Vadim, however, was besotted with her and was desperate to make her his wife. She was Brigitte Bardot, a charming youngster who was destined to become one of the most famous sex goddesses in cinema history. Vadim may have been consumed with desire but he had to wait two years before he could marry Bardot in 1952, the year in which she made her screen debut in Jean Boyer's banal comedy Le Trou normand (1952). Bardot appeared in another 16 films before Vadim gave her the role that was make her an international star, launching his own filmmaking career as he did so.

The film in question was Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956), the film that not only created the Bardot myth and made Vadim a very rich man, it totally transformed cinema - and not only in France - shattering the out-dated conventions and allowing the changes that were taking place in society at the start of the sexual revolution to be more accurately represented on the big screen. The film was a sensation at home and abroad, and it turned the quiet fishing village of St-Tropez into a buzzing haven for the rich and beautiful. And this was a good two years ahead of the French New Wave.

Et Dieu... créa la femme may have established Vadim as a film director, but this came at a huge personal cost. During the making of the film, Bardot began an affair with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and when the media got wind of this Vadim's marriage to the star he had created was over. Despite this, they remained on good terms and Bardot appeared in four of Vadim's subsequent films, including Les Bijoutiers du clair de lune (1958) and La Bride sur le cou (1961).

Vadim's fourth film Les Liaisons dangereuses (1959) stirred up a hornets' nest in France, not because of its supposedly immoral content, but because it was widely perceived as an outright betrayal of Choderlos De Laclos' famous novel. The learned members of the Sociéte des gens de lettres de France forced Vadim to append '1960' to its title, but the controversy ensured that it was another box office hit, attracting an even larger audience in France than Vadim's first film. It was during the making of this film that Vadim fell in love with his actress Annette Stroyberg. They married in 1958 and Vadim gave his second wife the lead in his next film, Et mourir de plaisir (1960), but they divorced later that year.

It was in 1962, on the set of Marc Allégret's Les Parisiennes, that Vadim fell for his next teenage siren, the 19-year-old Catherine Denueve. In the course of a short, whirlwind romance, Deneuve became pregnant and bore Vadim his first son, Christian Vadim, who went on to become an actor. It was Vadim who gave Denueve her first important screen role, in Le Vice et la vertu (1963). One year on, history repeated itself when Vadim met the American actress Jane Fonda on the set of La Ronde (1964). Fonda and Vadim married in 1965 and the couple had a daughter, Vanessa Vadim, but separated in 1972. It was Vadim who gave Fonda her best-known role in the cult sci-fi film Barbarella (1968), his last box office success. She also starred in La Curée (1966), Vadim's whimsical adaptation of Zola's novel, but this was a flop.

In 1975, Vadim married wife number four, Catherine Schneider, the 26 year old daughter of a steel magnate. Again, the union did not last; they divorced two years later. As his filmmaking career in France began its inexorable decline, Vadim decided to chance his hand in America, beginning with Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), a provocative comedy thriller in which Rock Hudson is cast (improbably) as psychopathic Don Juan. This was followed by Night Games (1980), The Hot Touch (1981), Surprise Party (1983) and And God Created Woman (1988), a disastrous remake of his debut feature which ended up being the last film Vadim made for the cinema. Meanwhile, he continued making films in France, the best known being Don Juan ou Si Don Juan était une femme... (1973), his final fling with Bardot, and Une femme fidèle (1976), which featured Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel. In 1990, Vadim, 62, married the 43 year old stage actress Marie-Christine Barrault. They remained together until the former's death in 2000.

In the 1990s, his cinema career behind him, Vadim divided his time between writing (he published four novels and a biography entitled D'une étoile à l'autre) and his work for the theatre. He also found time to direct a number of television films, including Mon père avait raison (1996), an adaptation of a popular Sacha Guitry play, and Un coup de baguette magique (1997), his final film. Vadim died from lymphoma on 11th February 2000, in Paris. He was cremated and his remains lie in a little cemetery on the outskirts of St Tropez, near to the private residence of the woman he had immortalised, Brigitte Bardot.

Filmography

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