- Jean Seberg, A bout de souffle/Breathless, France, 1960. Brigitte Bardot’s successor as Mme Roger Vadim was making a 1959 debut in his updated Les liaisons dangereuses, when he was visited by “a young man with a stammer, shy and, at the same time, sure of himself… He was going to make his first full-length film and wanted Annette to act in it… He left me the screenplay – one and a half erasure-covered pages, which I read carefully without understanding a word. This strange young man had impressed me and I trusted him, instinctively. I advised Annette to accept his offer. She refused. A pity and her loss. The strange young man was called Jean-Luc Godard and his film was Breathless.”
- Gia Scala, The Guns of Navarone, 1961. She met with exiled US writer-producer Carl Foreman in London. Everyone was interested in the second Mme Vadim. Until seeing her in films made by M Vadim… Foreman (the Oscar-winning scenarist of The Bridge on the River Kwai) aimed high for his Allied saboteurs in WWII Greece – starting with Cary Grant and Marlon Brando! When it came to the traitor, Anna, his choice was between Vadim’s latest new (Danish) version of Brigitte Bardot and Hollywood’s Liverpool-born Sicilian star, Gia. And she was Anna again in her very next movie, The Triumph of Robin Hood, with areas of Slovenia standing in for Nottingham and Sherwood.
- Michèle Mercier, Angélique, marquise des anges, France, 1964. At first, Paris producteur Francis Cosne could only think of Vadim’s women: Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Jane Fonda, Annette Strøyberg. Oh, plus Claudia Cardinale, Monica Vitti and Marina Vlady. Oh, plus Claudia Cardinale, Monica Vitti and Marina Vlady. Actually, it’s quite pleasurable to think of Vadim’s women…
Birth year: 1936Death year: 2005Other name: Casting Calls: 3