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Brigitte Bardot's rise from fashion model and film
starlet to global celebrity was meteoric and
unprecedented: after her breakthrough role in Et
Dieu ... créa la femme in 1956, audiences the world
over rushed to see her films. Predating Beatlemania, she
provoked mass hysteria: paparazzi stalked her,
journalists, sociologists and novelists wrote about her;
young women imitated her style. All at once sex bomb,
radical proto-feminist and scandalous figurehead of a
hedonistic and sexually free lifestyle, 'B.B.' was
France's first mass-media star.
In this original and
illuminating study, film scholar and Bardot fan Ginette
Vincendeau explores the star's complex and
revolutionary
image of femininity, her film career
and her lasting and controversial celebrity. Analysing
all Bardot's output, encompassing popular
comedies
and melodramas, work with New Wave directors Louis Malle
and Jean-Luc Godard, and international productions
such
as Dear Brigitte (1965) and
Shalako (1968), Vincendeau shows how Bardot's
enduring fame is based on her status as a sexual,
lifestyle, musical, and fashion role model and even, in
her guise as Marianne, the emblem of the French
Republic, an icon of national
identity. Finally, she
considers the ageing Bardot's continued prominence in
popular culture through her own writings and animal
rights activism, arguing that, as well as a glamorous
film star, Bardot was one of the inventors of modern
celebrity.
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