Vadim, Roger (1928-2000), French film director, screenwriter, and producer, creator of showcases for beautiful actresses. Of French-Ukrainian parentage, he was born Roger Vadim Plemiannikov in Paris, the son of a diplomat. After a peripatetic childhood he entered cinema in 1947 as assistant to the director Marc Allégret. Vadim’s own first film as director, Et Dieu Créa la Femme (1956; And God Created Woman), catapulted himself, his then wife, Brigitte Bardot, and the film’s location, the Provençal port of Saint-Tropez, to international fame.

Vadim’s low-budget, semi-improvised style of shooting was credited with anticipating the methods of the nouvelle vague film-makers, and his debut film’s huge success may well have helped them find funding. But his concerns proved far more commercial: to make sexually titillating films starring his current actress lover. When Bardot left him after two more films consolidating her sex-symbol status, he starred his newest discovery, Annette Stroyberg, in a modern version of the classic 1782 French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959). Stroyberg was succeeded by Catherine Deneuve, who appeared in Vadim’s remake of La Ronde (1964; Circle of Love), universally dismissed as vastly inferior to the 1950 version by Max Ophuls.

La Ronde also featured Vadim’s next lover, Jane Fonda, who starred in his biggest international hit, the science-fiction spoof Barbarella (1968). But with nudity and sexual frankness spreading to Hollywood, his stock-in-trade was ceasing to seem distinctive. Vadim’s first American film, the black comedy Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), did poorly, and none of his subsequent films, whether French or American, met with success; an English-language remake of his first hit, And God Created Woman (1987), this time with Rebecca de Mornay, did not enjoy the reception of the original.