Roger Vadim

Postwar Paris and the cinema

Roger Vadim was born Roger Vadim Plemiannikov in Paris in 1928. He worked as a journalist and screenwriter before directing films, entering the French film industry during the years when younger writers and directors were challenging its studio conventions.

And God Created Woman

Vadim directed and co-wrote And God Created Woman in 1956 with Brigitte Bardot in the leading role. The film turned Bardot into an international star and made Saint-Tropez part of her public image. Its sexual candor and attention to a young woman's autonomy were unusual in mainstream French cinema of the period.

Vadim and Bardot were married from 1952 to 1957. He directed her again in The Night Heaven Fell in 1957. Their work together belongs to the years immediately before the New Wave, and French film histories often treat Bardot's screen presence as one of the changes that prepared its audience.

Adaptations and international films

Vadim updated an eighteenth-century novel for Dangerous Liaisons in 1959, with Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe, and later directed Catherine Deneuve in Vice and Virtue. His best-known international production was Barbarella (1968), a science-fiction comedy starring Jane Fonda.

He continued directing film and theater and published memoirs about his career. Vadim died in Paris in 2000.