La vie et la carrière de Brigitte Bardot (2018)

Hello and welcome to this new issue of Confidentiel. An hour together on RTL where we explore the paths of personalities. Not always straight lines, but zigzags, crossroads, dangerous shortcuts. Glory, honors, money often hide unsuspected traps, even when you are a world idol, an absolute icon. The woman I'm going to tell you the story of is still today the most famous of the French. She could probably shine more, but she was too lucid, too determined, too whole to be dazzled by the lights of success. Initial baby, Confidentiel Brigitte Bardos and right now on RTL. RTL, Jean-Alphonse Richard. Confidentiel. Brigitte Bardos never liked cinema. She was always wary of her double, who was called baby. Two initials through which she did not recognize herself. All her life, Brigitte was looking for Bardos to finally find her once the old woman came to an old fisherman's village on the Mediterranean coast. Brigitte Bardos was born at the dawn of the war, in a family of very good Parisian bourgeoisie. A father, nicknamed Louis, who runs a factory, the Bardos Establishments and Company, air and liquid oxygen. A mother, Anne-Marie, a housewife who does not work. The beautiful neighborhoods, the Sunday mass, the Catholic schools, the farmhouse of Louvcienne, the nurses, a governess who follows her everywhere and watches each of her steps. I was a secret little girl, shy, fearful, tells Brigitte Bardos. In this confiscated childhood, Brigitte Bardos knows at the age of four her first disarray. The birth of her little sister, Marie-Jeanne, immediately renamed Mijanou. It's a fracture. The brunette with hazel eyes, thought to be alone, she learns adversity and competition. She also has the impression of being abandoned by her mother, especially since Mijanou is much prettier than Brigitte, who wears glasses and a dental device. Brigitte Bardos suddenly feels a cruel feeling of abandonment, which will follow her all her life. When you don't look at her, she faints, afraid of being neglected. Later, with her lovers, as soon as she perceives the slightest laziness, less attention, she will immediately turn her heels, leave first since we are not interested enough in her, leave as soon as possible to avoid suffering. For the moment, Brigitte takes refuge in dance. She excels in it. She is very talented. It may be a future star of classical ballet. I loved to dance, it's as if I were another me, she says. At 13, Brigitte Bardos enters the Conservatoire de Danse et de Musique de Paris. Then begins for her, the great escape. Her father, despite being seated on the principles, he also has a small artistic fiber. He writes poems and loves opera. He sees rather with a good eye this destiny. His mother, who is bored in silence and dreams of making hats, encourages his eldest daughter. Bardos takes advantage of it, she emancipates herself and episodically leaves the family roof. First show in Fougères, Brittany. She is 14 years old, a ballerina among ballerinas. The public does not know that he has in front of his eyes the one who, in less than 10 years, will be the most famous French woman in the world. Two years later, she occurs during a cruise of 15 days in the Mediterranean. She is only 16 years old, a perfect body, a wild look, a soft booty, we only see her. The first effect Bardos. On the boat deck of Grasse, men will all want to invite her to dance, causing furious scenes of jealousy among their wives. Such a look can only be found in the newspapers. Especially since the little dancer, with the blessing of mom and dad, also plays the junior models. During a parade on the music of the Lac des Signes, we notice it. First photo for the Garden of Fashions, then La Veillée des Chaumières, Fashions et Tricots, and above all, Elle, the new major modern women's newspaper. A single photo, published in the number 232 of May 8, 1950, is the origin of the fabulous destiny of Brigitte Bardot. You're so like the lady with the mystic smile Is it only cause you're lonely they have blamed you For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa? Jean-Alphonse Richard Confidentiel, on RTL The very first steps of Brigitte Bardot, little Parisian bourgeois, who learns to play very young with her image, to tell us about the one who is not yet a baby. With us in this studio, Emmanuel Gilsher. Hello and welcome to RTL. Hello. Emmanuel Gilsher, assistant director of Antenne de France 2 and author of La Rousse de Simone. Antenne and Brigitte, it's a captivating cross-portrait of Simone Signoret and Brigitte Bardot. But sorry Emmanuel Gilsher, we will only keep Brigitte today. This Brigitte Bardot, who is very young, it must be said, instinctively attracts all eyes. Yes, so she already attracts them from childhood because what is special is that she has a father who has a camera. So she was born in 1934, so there are not many people who had private cameras at the time. And so she learned very quickly to be comfortable with the camera and especially not to seduce her. Besides, she has a natural, which will be her trademark years later. Family that has principles, that's important in the construction of Brigitte Bardot. Yes, it's very important, it's a rigid education, codes, principles. And it's something that was very difficult for her, who was a very sensitive child. This frame of which she wanted to escape quite quickly. Yes, because it doesn't laugh at the Bardots. There is a traumatic experience in her childhood. Brigitte Bardot and her young sister Mijanou, who decide to play cowboys and Indians. And then they drop the little Chinese girl, cherished by the mother. So the parents come home, the punishment does not last long, the punishment which is terrifying. It's stabbing, 50 stabbing. The humiliation is that the mother, under the blow of anger, tells them, you are now foreigners. You should now see yourself. And what is even more terrible, is that this sentence will never be lifted. So Brigitte felt rejected, abandoned. It was already a wild child, a little different. And there, she has the impression that there is a huge gulf that separates her from this family cocoon, which she aspires to as a child. The chapter of childhood and adolescence, it ends finally with the arrival of Roger Vadim, who takes a little bit of Bardot as a prey. Absolutely, because in parallel to her destiny as a dancer, she goes a little against the will of the parents, doing what we would call today cover girl. She is spotted, photos. And finally, the parents are very bored with that. Then it's the grandfather, who is quite nice, who says, listen to this child, if she has to become a whore, she will become otherwise. So let her do it. And finally, the parents let go a little, so she becomes cover girl. And one day Vadim sees her. And then, of course, there will be this love at first sight. And then we know a little bit of history. And Bardot, Vadim, you say it, a passionate and burning couple. However, it has never been a question between them to found a family. No, so that first, because in the end, the story was quite short. And then she met him very, very young. She was 15 years old. But besides, you don't necessarily make a 15-year-old child. She saw that her mother having children at that time, it didn't allow her to emancipate. She even aborted Vadim. So it was not at all a concern of Brigitte Bardot. RTL Confidential Jean-Alphonse Richard No one will ever know who of the director, Marc Allégret, or of the young screenwriter without the money, Roger Vadim, fell first on this cover. On which a brunette Brigitte Bardot, in striped shirt, holds a cup of tea. The legend is a question. Are young girls hateful? Not really for Vadim, who sees in this unknown one of the heroines of the scenario that he has just finished for Allégret. The laurels are cut. When I invented this character, I thought he didn't exist. And here he was, under my eyes. Brigitte, 15 and a half, goes to the appointment organized by Vadim and Allégret, accompanied by her mother. But this time, she forgets everything. The film she could shoot, her mother and Marc Allégret, to melt into the gloomy look and enchantment of Roger Vadim, playboy flamboyant of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It scared me, attracted me. I was lost, says Bardot. With Vadim, Brigitte Bardot discovers love, the vertigo of a burning passion. These games are forbidden. The link in a Bonn room, under the roofs of Paris, is secret. But these stolen kisses end up being invented. Louis Bardot gets angry. He threatens Roger Vadim with a revolver. He locks Brigitte in a double turn, but nothing is done. Brigitte flees, desperate, strikes hunger and speech. Tries theatrically to commit suicide, head in the family gas oven. Bardot's parents then transition. Roger Vadim can stay. He can marry their daughter, but only when she is 18, in two years. Two years will be enough to make her famous. All Bardot's success rests on this period, 1951-1952. Roger Vadim is more than a future husband. Entering Paris Match, where he inaugurates the People section, he is a mentor who takes him everywhere. He wants to make her famous at all costs, because he knows that one day, he will be able to collect the honors of giving birth to an icon. He pushes her to multiply the photos, those in the company of the Parisians, or on the beach of Cannes, to turn her into a starlet. Bardot is not yet a baby, has not played any role in cinema, and does not sing, but her face is everywhere in magazines. Nobody knows who she is, but everyone knows her. First of all, she has the turn. What a wonder in the bus, to see people reading articles about me. I did not come back. Once past the twenties, she will rejoice. Being known at first is great. After, we are fed up. Or, it's because we are stupid, she says, leaving a crack that will not cease to grow. A ferocious premonition, the fear that the celebrity will devour her, and end up breaking her. From the start, there are two women who face each other. Brigitte, light, who has fun, makes heads turn, will soon collect lovers, and then Bardot, inhabited by doubt, much less frivolous star than he seems. Cinema takes hold of this Brigitte Bardot. We like her insolent and sexy side, young lighter, who makes the gentlemen's heads turn and attracts the women's lightning. From her first appearance on the screen, in the Norman hole, with the star of the moment, Bourville, Bardot appears under the traits of a delusional ingenuity. Yes, yes, you are very pretty. Oh, you scared me. Really? Roll a little, you will be delighted. A photo, miss? A beautiful souvenir from the bar? Oh no, no, no, especially no photos. With her, the wind blows of a whole new sensuality. A little later, on the nicely undressed shooting of Nero's weekends, in the Cinecitta studios in Rome, she will be blonde. Vadim will ask her to never change her hair color again, which will become his sign of recognition. The platinum blonde was that of the fifties, the brown-haired Bardot will be that of the sixties. Roger Vadim, now married and director, has more than ever decided to make a star. He has for her a custom film. Vadim is looking for a little scandal, but does not doubt that this one shooting will make of his young wife an eternal myth. Bardot is 22 years old and an arrogant beauty. On the beach of a lost village of the Varroese coast, Saint-Tropez, she embodies Juliet in Et Dieu créa la femme. The time is not yet at the sexual revolution, but Brigitte Bardot already embodies an insolent freedom, that for a woman to be able to dispose at her will of her love destiny, in contempt of uses and conveniences. Kitt has passed for the devil, a compliment for this young girl who believes in God and prays every day. In the USA, the archbishops ask for the boycott of this pornographic film. At the Vatican stand, at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels, Bardot embodies the lust among the seven capital sins. In Switzerland, she will one day be bombarded with tomatoes and treated as a whore of France. In a Parisian clinic, a woman will try to plant a pair of scissors in her chest for all the harm she has done. Bardot is not afraid of love. And God Created the Woman is a sulphurous film, but Brigitte is thrown into a lost body. She confirms, I took advantage of this love that was displayed to make some scenes warmer, more convincing. With hindsight, we know today that the scenes with Jean-Louis Trintignant go well beyond the simple acting. On the set, Bardot fell madly in love with Trintignant. The connection will be torrid and ephemeral, but Bardot will say, I lived with him the most intense period, the happiest of all this period of my life. Brigitte Bardot seems to enter directly into the legend. It is a seed of stars that newspapers, photographers, and radios are disputing. The slightest of her steps is now counted. Each of her words analyzed, the slightest hesitation interpreted. Object of convoitism, even the most unexpected. In the middle of the war in Algeria, the OAS wants to kidnap her. She does not give up, files a complaint and writes an open letter. I do not walk because I do not want to live in a Nazi country, she replies to her master singers. The newspaper Libération titles BBB. Bravo, Brigitte Bardot. BB Honored guest in London by the Queen of England in person accompanied by the American Marilyn Monroe. Friendly meeting between the two blonde bombs of cinema, magazines will try in vain to make rivals. He's your guy when stocks are high but beware when they start to descend. It's then that those lasses go back to their spouses. Diamonds are a girl's best friend. I've heard of affairs that are strictly platonic but diamonds are a girl's best friend. And I think of affairs that you must keep while signing a bit of bets. If little pets get big baguettes, time rolls on and youth is gone and you can't straighten up when you bend. But stiff back or stiff knees you stand straight at. Sire! On ciel Brigitte Bardot sur RTL Jean-Alphonse Richard Bonjour c'est Julien Selier Bonjour c'est Marina Giraudeau Eveillons et vous informons dans la bonne nuit. Jean-Alphonse Richard Confidentiel The Bardomania des Ferles, but the one that we start to call baby, has the blues. She drowns the Cannes festival in 1957. I will do everything so that no one talks about me in the newspapers. I am the most fierce of the anti-Bardos. My life looks like a prison, she says, uncomfortable in this whirlwind that she does not master. But where is Bardo going in this storm that she herself has stirred? With her, the press holds a profitable prey. Her Parisian apartment is permanently in a state of siege. The little white house she bought in Saint-Tropez, the Madrague, becomes the favorite destination of the paparazzi. All the more so that at the age of 26, the baby has just given birth to a little Nicolas, the son she had with the actor-director Jacques Charié. Difficult and distressing pregnancy that she spent locked up in her apartment. Despite the clichés of happiness just after birth, Brigitte Bardot will never be a mother of dreams. Prepared for everything, but certainly not to be a mother. Ten days after giving birth, she is on the set of La Vérité de Clouseau, falls in love with her partner Samy Fré. Her relationship with Jacques Charié explodes. The baby is in a state of marasmus. She even makes a very real suicide attempt, by cutting her veins in the garden of a house on the Côte d'Azur. Bardot divorces. The little Nicolas will be entrusted to successive nurses. She will not see him again for five years, she will not see him grow up, she will find him episodically in the middle of nowhere. One day she will learn, through a friend, that Nicolas is married. She was not invited. The baby will make peace only much later, with this lost child, when she will be almost 70 years old. Her son, her intimate wound, certainly the worst of her murders. Henri-Georges Clouseau, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, polish the image of Brigitte Bardot. Hollywood even gives the French a soft look, but without ever convincing her. She tears the myriad contract that made her reach the Universal Studios. Bardot is inflexible, always the same answer regarding the Americans. No question of working in a country that executed Rosenberg's wives, communists accused of espionage. The baby will therefore refuse Histoire d'Eau, the Thomas Crown affair with Steve McQueen, or even Marlon Brando's proposals. The United States and Hollywood will not blame Brigitte Bardot and will continue to unroll the red carpet for her. As in the mid-sixties, when she is at the top of her fame, for the American presentation of Viva Maria, she is welcomed at the airport in a limousine with glass roofs. The crowd follows her everywhere, shouts her name, she suffocates. The stay turns into a nightmare. A flash of photographs bursts and the wound to the right eye is never efficient. Back in France, the gaze hidden by black glasses, she will take refuge in the house of Bazoche, in the Yvelines, rushing into the shelter to take in her arms two of her pensioners, Cornichon and Nenette. RTL Jean-Alphonse Richard Confidentiel Not easy to be a star as she seems to suffer, this Brigitte Bardot that the whole world claims. Emmanuelle Guilcher, you who know perfectly well the trajectory of bébé, why this aversion that will not stop amplifying for the show and the vedettaria? It is an aversion linked to the fact that she was notorious for being suffocating. I think she was not prepared to become this kind of world digest symbol of the liberation of the dead. And then there is a phenomenon, it is the emergence of the paparazzi and this life in prison that was hers as soon as she became known. She aspired to freedom, to be an ordinary woman despite her extraordinary physique and she ended up in a prison. In addition, I think that the cinema, the vedettaria was not something that was an absolute foundation for her. She wanted her life to serve something and we saw it in the second part of her life where she put all her strength in the fight against animal suffering and the cinema never deeply interested her. She did not like to play deeply, she liked to be, to be interested in her person. It was a way to be loved but it was not a passion. And what suffering, because you tell it in the book with this shooting of Brigitte Bardot in La Vérité by Henri-Georges Clouseau. Ah yes, so it's a test because it's the first time where a director agrees to see something other than the character she showed. So she will be for the first time tragic, but at the same time the tragedy she gives to the spectator in La Vérité is hers. It is that of a woman who is nailed to the pylori, who is misunderstood and when she speaks to the judge at the end of La Vérité saying no, but you who did not like, you can not understand what it is, it's Brigitte Bardot herself who speaks to us, it's not the character. And in this journey of suffering that marks Brigitte Bardot a lot, there is also the birth of her little boy, this infancy which is almost above her strength, Brigitte Bardot. Yes, so today we would call it denial of pregnancy, baby blues. What is certain is that she was judged a lot for the way she behaved or did not behave with her child. But you have to see that it was still a child who was barely coming out of adolescence. She was not able to be a mother. She would have wanted to have an abortion, except that no doctor could take the risk of aborting Brigitte Bardot. At the time, abortion was not free. If there had been an accident, it would have been something terrible. So she had this child despite her, and the maternal instinct did not develop, she was not helped. And certainly if she had been helped, if there had been psychologists around her at the time, her story with her child would have been fundamentally different because it is someone who is able to love. RTL, Jean-Alphonse Richard Confidentiel In less than 10 years, Brigitte Bardot will give up cinema, she will no longer be seen on the set. While the 60s are stretching, baby is having fun, organizes parties to get drunk, get drunk for the jet set, like this incredible masked ball when she appears in a black leather bikini, with a belt handle, soft on the eyes, surrounded by five Amazons. She multiplies romances with celebrities like Gilbert Beko or Sacha Distel and unknown playboys. Impossible to tame. When I don't like it anymore, I'm leaving, she professes to whoever wants to hear it. This love, that Brigitte Bardot never ceases to hope despite her denigrations, sometimes takes a little longer. In the summer of 1966, in a Tropézien restaurant, she meets the gaze of the German billionaire Gunther Sachs. He dazzled me, she will say. A few days later, on July 14, the couple gets married in Las Vegas. But baby, once again, feels captive. Gunther Sachs wants to install her in his apartment on Avenue Foch. He shows her his Bavarian properties. She is horrified by the hunting trophies hanging on the walls of his manors. Gunther Sachs will cover Bardot's gifts, but will not be able to put her in a cage. A singer comes to disturb the romance. Serge Gainsbourg. Gainsbourg had met Bardot in 1959 on the set of Will You Dance With Me? He had not dared to approach him. Here he is, who offers him some songs today. At baby's, Avenue Paul Dumer, whose husband does not have the key, Gainsbourg settles one day at the piano. Bardot sings Harley Davidson. The very evening, they will drink champagne and then they will be lovers. It was a meeting that lasted three months, without a shadow, without a cloud, Bardot says. 90 days of crazy love, it must simply be called happiness. At his request, Gainsbourg will write a sensual and scandalous song. The recording, at the request of Gunther Sachs, will remain for a long time forbidden. Testimony of the shortest and most intense love story that the actress has ever known. I love you. Well resolved. Confidential on RTL. Now, baby will live in sweet pain, letting the mirages of his career without ever trying to catch up with them. The films succeed, success is often there, even if the time has changed and that the actress no longer provokes the same erotic emotion. In 20 years of career, she shot about forty feature films and seems to be more and more feared the film of Tro. Il y en aura deux, in 1973, including Juan in 1973, then Colino, Trousse chemise. Bardot, at 39 years old, her beauty is intact, she shines. In the middle of shooting Colino Trousse chemise, she confides to the past, to François. I live in the mirror, I felt like a prisoner. All this seemed superfluous to me, ridiculous, useless. Later, she adds, I decided to leave the cinema before it leaves me. I always behave like this in life, I leave before it is done, I decide. Brigitte Bardot leaves the scene tired, to the limit of saturation. She has the feeling of being too long on a path she thought covered with roses, but where the thorns had become too many and painful. No one will be able to catch up with her, the clearest refugee of her time, to the beating. Bardot will never be a baby again. Men have disappointed her, the human species sometimes disgusts her. She becomes the madonna of animals, most often with fracas. In 1976, she manifests in front of the embassy of Norway. Pity for the baby seals, she asks. The following year, on March 15, Brigitte goes to war on the banquise, to oppose the massacre of these baby seals. So virulent that it provokes a diplomatic incident between Canada and France. She will leave Newfoundland, threatened by hunters and under the protection of the police. Her helicopter will land a little further, the time for baby, after having almost slipped into the icy water, to squeeze against her two baby seals. The photo will go around the world and will mark the spirits. First act of an obsessive crusade that will never stop against the slaughterhouses, the corrida, the hunt. Brigitte Bardot rarely returns to her past. She has let time catch up with her, or rather, has learned to pact with her. No question of cheating, of false pretenses, or of false fleeing. Saint-Tropez is no longer the secret village of her youth, but it is her last retreat. Here, one day, she chose the place where she will rest. It will not be the cemetery of Saint-Tropez, where the curious would have marched all year and where the first man of her life, Roger Vadim, will finally leave her alone. of the sun and songs yet I know well next year everything will bloom again we will come back but in the meantime I'm in pain to leave my house the mistral will get used to running without the sails and it's in my hair that it will no longer miss me the sun my great friend will only burn me from afar seeing that we are together a little angry to be all separated the train will take me to autumn to find the city under the rain my grief will be for no one I will keep it as a friend but on the first day of summer all the forgotten troubles will come back to party to the crustaceans of the sunny beach Confidentiel Jean-Alphonse Richard on RTL So that's it for the novel by Brigitte Bardot Independent and indomitable for an hour with us for this Confidentiel baby Emmanuelle Guilcher, author of a book which follows in particular the trajectory of Bardot Emmanuelle Guilcher, why this infinite love for animals? So we could do the psychoanalysis of Bazar and say it was a tracked animal it was suffocated when the parrots chased it so it's the animal but I think it goes much further it's someone who has always been surrounded by animals when she was a child she often says that she would have dreamed of being in Bambi it has a rather childish side in its appreciation of things and then she built around this passion for the animal that does not speak that is defenseless a real mission it was often caricatured for its defense of baby seals but it's the submerged face of the iceberg and by the way the philosophers started by Marguerite Ursenart had spotted it for this fight and today we can see how much she was a precursor in this defense then it's not really the actress who does that for advertising she wanted her notoriety to serve something and she put it in the service of the animal which for her is more human than us You told us earlier that Bardot did not like cinema how did she experience this rupture with cinema? She says it herself it's always difficult when you've been a star on the one hand hated by some but adored by others to find yourself alone without the phone ringing without everything around she was very young she was 40 she had to fill this void Brigitte Bardot is a melancholic person who has depressive tendencies she tried several suicides so she had to feed this existential anxiety so it was difficult at first but she devoted most of her days to fight on all fronts You say a melancholic woman what are the men who counted the most for her? Bardot is not an Amazon she is a lover of love she is sincere she had 4 husbands the last one is here since 1992 so there is a form of stability she had a lot of famous lovers the one who counted the most she says it herself it's Serge Gainsbourg because it was an impossible love he said it's a jewel we could not open the screen and it's Serge Gainsbourg who composed for her Je t'aime moi non plus she accepted to age does she really make fun of her image? No, I don't think so she says age is not funny she admits she never used any artificial even when she was a star she was the anti-Marilyn Monroe she was natural by respect for herself she has a great sense of aesthetics a great sense of beauty but she refuses everything that is superfetatory everything that is artificial for me, Brigitte Bardot is the embodiment of truth