In 1986 Roger Vadim, who has died aged 72, published a book entitled Bardot, Deneuve and Fonda: My Life With The Three Most Beautiful Women In The World, and by that time this was the only guise in which he would be known - a Svengali to international sex symbols, who was only too ready to trade on his own tabloid reputation. Vadim may never have been less than that, but at one time he was also more: a film-maker of distinctive talents, whose early works were seen by some as helping to pave the way for the new wave which revolutionised French cinema at the end of the 1950s.
Not for nothing did François Truffaut describe Vadim’s debut, And God Created Woman (1956) as “sensitive and intelligent, a film that belongs to this generation”. The advertising slogan of the time said, “God created woman, but the devil made Bardot.” And Vadim’s first volume of autobiography was titled Memoirs Of The Devil.
Roger Vadim (born Plemiannikov), the son of a French mother and a Russian diplomat father, grew up in Alexandria, moving to France after his father’s death. He spent much of the war in the French alps, where his half-English step-father supported the allies, hid communists and Jews and smuggled them across the Swiss border. His best friend was burned to death by the SS along with a French officer collaborator, inside a barn with some villagers: this incident he included in his novel, The Hungry Angel (1984), which is set both in wartime and postwar France. “With the liberation, we felt like a bird who has just opened the cage,” he once said.
After the war, like his hero in the novel, Vadim gravitated to the Parisian Left Bank, acted for three years at the Charles Dullin theatre, but left because he disliked the repetition of daily performances. He found employment in the cinema as an assistant, and sometime screenwriter, for the successful director Marc Allégret - and he also met Bardot, then only 15. They were married when she was 18, in 1952, by which time she was beginning to make a name as a movie starlet.
Vadim, who had gained some directing experience in television, persuaded the producer Raoul Levy to let him direct a film starring his wife. The result was And God Created Woman. In Vadim’s Cinemascope opus, about a girl from the wrong side of the tracks landing on her feet and in a succession of beds on the riviera, Bardot emerged as something provocatively new in the history of screen sirens. The movie adroitly wove a child-of-nature ambience around his leading lady.
Vadim’s second film, made without Bardot, was When The Devil Drives (1957), an erotic melodrama evocatively shot in a wintry Venice and set to a score by the Modern Jazz Quartet, which projected a modishness whose very superficiality proved a commentary on the times. His third film, Heaven Fell That Night (1958), reunited him with Bardot, although by then they were divorced. A tale of fatal passion and smuggling across the Franco-Spanish border, it displayed the hallmarks of Vadim’s direction - his use of wide screen and glossy presentation of landscape - and brought to a high pitch of intensity Bardot’s combination of waywardness and vulnerability.
Subsequently, Vadim became involved with Annette Stroyberg, his wife from 1958 until 1961. He won for her a subsidiary role in his most prestigious undertaking (so much so that the film was to appear on the curriculum of US universities): a modern dress version of Laclos’s novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959), starring Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Phillipe and made with monochrome austerity.
His next inamorata was Catherine Deneuve, then less well-known than she would become. Deneuve starred in Vadim’s Vice And Virtue (1962), a somewhat crass updating of de Sade to the Nazi era, but their liaison proved shortlived, and Jane Fonda became the next object of his on-and-off screen desires.
It was in her films with Vadim, to whom she was married from 1965 to 1968, that her initial star image was set, though it was one she later vociferously repudiated. Fonda played in Vadim’s remake of La Ronde (1964), a major commercial hit, in The Game Is Over (1966), and finally in Barbarella (1968).
Vadim subsequently went to Hollywood and made Pretty Maids All In A Row (1971), a campus-set black comedy of some mordancy. Of his 26 films, it was his last noteworthy achievement, though he remained active in both France and the US for several years. But by this time, the Emmanuelle school of soft-porn had effectively colonised the erotic territory he had once more inventively mapped, and he seemed to be left in a blind alley. In 1988, he was reduced to undertaking an American remake of And God Created Woman. Nondescript and not even titillating, it sank without trace. Vadim’s day was done.
At the time of his death, he was still with his fifth wife, Marie-Christine Barrault, whom he married in 1990. He also leaves two daughters born to Stroyberg and Fonda, and two sons born to Deneuve and Schneider.
Roger Vadim (Vladimir Plemiannikov), film director, born January 26 1928; died February 11 2000