(Planeta. Barcelona. 1987. 24 cm. 245 p., [24] p. de lám. ...)
Planeta. Barcelona. 1987. 24 cm. 245 p., [24] p. de lám. Encuadernación en tapa blanda de editorial ilustrada. Vadim, Roger 1928-2000. Traducción del inglés por Marta Giráldez. Al filo del tiempo. vol. 64. Traducción de: Bardot, Deneuve & Fonda. Bardot, Brigitte. 1934-. Deneuve, Catherine. 1943-. Fonda, Jane. 1937- .. Este libro es de segunda mano y tiene o puede tener marcas y señales de su anterior propietario. ISBN: 84-320-4776-7
Roger Vadim was a French screenwriter, film director and producer, as well as an author, artist and occasional actor. His best-known works are visually lavish films with erotic qualities, such as And God Created Woman (1956), Barbarella (1968), and Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971).
Background
Vadim was born as Roger Vadim Plemiannikov in Paris. His father, Igor Nikolaevich Plemiannikov, a White Russian military officer and pianist, had emigrated from Ukraine and became a naturalized French citizen, and was a vice consul of France to Egypt, stationed in Alexandria. His mother, Marie-Antoinette (née Ardilouze), was a French writer and essayist. Although Vadim lived as a diplomat's child in Northern Africa and the Middle East in his early youth, the death of his father, when Vadim was nine years old, caused the family to return to France, where his mother found work running a hostel in the French Alps, which was functioning as a way-station for Jews and other fugitives fleeing Nazism.
Education
Vadim studied journalism and writing at the University of Paris, without graduating.
Career
After the war, like his hero in the novel, Vadim gravitated to the Parisian Left Bank, acted for three years at the Charles Dullin theatre, but left because he disliked the repetition of daily performances. He found employment in the cinema as an assistant, and sometime screenwriter, for the successful director Marc Allégret - and he also met Bardot, then only 15. They were married when she was 18, in 1952, by which time she was beginning to make a name as a movie starlet.
Vadim, who had gained some directing experience in television, persuaded the producer Raoul Levy to let him direct a film starring his wife. The result was And God Created Woman. In Vadim's Cinemascope opus, about a girl from the wrong side of the tracks landing on her feet and in a succession of beds on the riviera, Bardot emerged as something provocatively new in the history of screen sirens. The movie adroitly wove a child-of-nature ambience around his leading lady.
Vadim's second film, made without Bardot, was When The Devil Drives (1957), an erotic melodrama evocatively shot in a wintry Venice and set to a score by the Modern Jazz Quartet, which projected a modishness whose very superficiality proved a commentary on the times. His third film, Heaven Fell That Night (1958), reunited him with Bardot, although by then they were divorced. A tale of fatal passion and smuggling across the Franco-Spanish border, it displayed the hallmarks of Vadim's direction - his use of wide screen and glossy presentation of landscape - and brought to a high pitch of intensity Bardot's combination of waywardness and vulnerability.
Subsequently, Vadim became involved with Annette Stroyberg, his wife from 1958 until 1961. He won for her a subsidiary role in his most prestigious undertaking (so much so that the film was to appear on the curriculum of US universities): a modern dress version of Laclos's novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959), starring Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Phillipe and made with monochrome austerity.
His next inamorata was Catherine Deneuve, then less well-known than she would become. Deneuve starred in Vadim's Vice And Virtue (1962), a somewhat crass updating of de Sade to the Nazi era, but their liaison proved shortlived, and Jane Fonda became the next object of his on-and-off screen desires.
It was in her films with Vadim, to whom she was married from 1965 to 1968, that her initial star image was set, though it was one she later vociferously repudiated. Fonda played in Vadim's remake of La Ronde (1964), a major commercial hit, in The Game Is Over (1966), and finally in Barbarella (1968).
Vadim subsequently went to Hollywood and made Pretty Maids All In A Row (1971), a campus-set black comedy of some mordancy. Of his 26 films, it was his last noteworthy achievement, though he remained active in both France and the US for several years. But by this time, the Emmanuelle school of soft-porn had effectively colonised the erotic territory he had once more inventively mapped, and he seemed to be left in a blind alley. In 1988, he was reduced to undertaking an American remake of And God Created Woman. Nondescript and not even titillating, it sank without trace. Vadim's day was done.
At the time of his death, he was still with his fifth wife, Marie-Christine Barrault, whom he married in 1990. He also leaves two daughters born to Stroyberg and Fonda, and two sons born to Deneuve and Schneider.
Roger Vadim (Vladimir Plemiannikov), film director, born January 26 1928; died February 11 2000
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Personality
But even if you decide that Vadim’s voyeurism is sad, sordid, and lifeless, it is also a universal corruption of humanity (so universal that it becomes normal), and deep in the heart of cinema. II it is possible that the majority of sexual activity in the world is notional and private that is to say, not mutual, but enjoyed behind closed eyes then Vadim is worthy of study. Perhaps he is the smudged meeting place of art cinema and the sort of uninhibited catering to erotic taste that darkness has always encouraged and that the cinema may vet discover as its commercial destiny. When the streets are painful and dangerous, who is to deny the use of cinemas for lonely sell-expression, where the flickering image gives a brief substance to dreams that lift intolerable pressures?
Connections
Vadim was famous for his romances/marriages to beautiful actresses. In his mid-30s, he lived with the teenaged Catherine Deneuve, by whom he had a child, Christian Vadim, prior to his marriage to Fonda. He was also involved with American actress Cindy Pickett. Later, he cohabited with screenwriter Ann Biderman for several years, announcing their engagement in 1984, but the couple never wed.
He told a story about how he lost his virginity at age 16 when he spent the summer in Normandy. An older girl took a fancy to him. Outdoors that night, she introduced him to the art of love and what amazed him most was that what Hemingway had written came true-"the earth moved under him". Not until somewhat later did he realize that Allied ships were bombarding the coast in preparation for the D-day invasion.
Marriages:
Brigitte Bardot, 20 December 1952 – 6 December 1957 (divorced)
Annette Stroyberg, 17 June 1958 – 14 March 1961 (divorced); 1 daughter (Nathalie)
Jane Fonda, 14 August 1965 – 16 January 1973 (divorced); 1 daughter (Vanessa)
Catherine Schneider, 13 December 1975 – 10 June 1977 (divorced); 1 son (Vania)
Ann Biderman, Common Law Spouse (California)
Marie-Christine Barrault, 21 December 1990 – 11 February 2000 (his death)
He also had two stepsons from his marriage to Schneider (heiress to the Schneider-Creusot steel and armaments firm) as well as adult stepchildren from Barrault's first marriage to Daniel Toscan du Plantier, also a friend of Vadim's, who called him "a happy man. He was someone in whom there was so much satisfaction to the end of his life. The films merely reflected his happiness." Nathalie, his eldest child, told Fonda biographer Patricia Bosworth: "Jane was the love of my father's life."