Brigitte Bardot@90

Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Stars and Stardom in French Cinema: In-Depth Studies of Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Juliette Binoche, and More ‘, 2000:

“…Bardot undoubtedly ushered in a new femininity in 1950s France. Her spectacular youthful looks, her insolent wit, her blatant promiscuous lifestyle and her outspokenness were unlike any other star of the time, in France or elsewhere. Yet, at the same time her appeal depended on 'old' values: on traditional myths of femininity and on the display of her body, though a body repackaged for the times: nude, more 'natural', on location, in colour and Cinemascope. Bardot's stardom rested on the combination and reconciliation of these opposed sets of values. My analysis in this chapter concentrates on Bardot's period of high stardom, which was surprisingly short - from the release of Et Dieu ... crea la femme in 1956 to La Verite in 1960, her highest grossing film in France1 —though I will refer to earlier and later films, in particular her two New Wave films, Vie privee (1961) and Le Mepris (1963). As discussed in Chapter 1, in box-office terms alone, Bardot's ranking is relatively low. Yet, she outstrips all the stars in this book in fame. Both during her film career and since it ended in 1973, Bardot has been extraordinarily visible through press, television shows, documentaries, postcards, books, internet sites, etc. Original posters of her films are among the most expensive, and outside France they are among the few French posters available….”

 1956

Her husband Roger Vadim directed her for the first time in 1956’s Et Dieu...Crea La Femme (...And God Created Woman). The film gained notoriety worldwide due to her overt sexuality and she became an international star.

Photograph: Allstar

 

Marcello Mastroianni@100...He Never Really Knew How to Lie and He was Lazy

Shawn Levy, "Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome", 2016:  

 

"...Two things distinguished the young Marcello Mastroianni, according to those who knew him best and longest, and they remained essential truths about him, in important ways, throughout his varied and extraordinary life and career.

One, in the words of his mother, was “He never really knew how to lie. . . . I’d tell him not to bother to go on. He had such a simple face, like an open book.”

The other he himself declared in interviews for decades: “I am,” he would say, explaining some decision he’d made (or, more often, hadn’t made), “lazy.”

Both traits—an inability to dissemble and an inveterate indolence—were, it happened, perfect tools for the profession in which Mastroianni would become famous. On the one hand, he was at his absolute best as an actor when cast as someone whom he understood instinctively, someone whose experiences and attitudes were so natural to him that they might as well have been his own. On the other, his aversion to preparation, to study, even to learning scripts, lent his work an air of spontaneity, discovery, and immediacy that might have been lacking if he had put in more effort...."

 

 with Claudia Cardinale in "Il bell'Antonio", 1960