Though Brigitte Bardot threatened her parents with suicide at age 16 if she were not allowed to marry her considerably older boyfriend, Roger Vadim, the couple's marriage was in effect over by the time they made their first film together, ... And God Created Woman (1956). Under Vadim's Svengali-like influence, Bardot had been transformed from a preteen fashion model and movie bit player into a pop culture icon, whose fame rivaled that of Marilyn Monroe. Embroiled in a love affair with her ... And God Created Woman leading man, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Bardot divorced Vadim (who moved on to a tryst with Catherine Deneuve) but consented to follow him to Spain to play the lead in his third feature film, The Night Heaven Fell (1958). Shot against the backdrop of the Pyrenees, this adaptation of a novel by Albert Vidalie details the love of Bardot's pampered school girl for a coarse village youth (Stephen Boyd) who has killed her aristocrat uncle in a crime of honor. Bardot, Vadim, and Boyd were all stricken with illness during the difficult and remote location shoot (animal lover Bardot was also beset with fleas, having adopted a stray dog), during which flooding washed out a local cemetery and disinterred corpses from their graves. Though critics were dismissive, The Night Heaven Fell solidified Bardot's reputation as an international sex symbol. In 1959, she married actor Jacques Charrier, her costar in Christian-Jacque's Babette Goes to War (1959), an attempt by Bardot to break away from seductress roles and test her strengths as a comedienne.

By Richard Harland Smith