Roger Vadim; French Filmmaker, Companion to Stars

PARIS —  Roger Vadim, the French filmmaker and ladies’ man who launched the movie career of his first wife, Brigitte Bardot, making the pouty Parisienne one of the best-known sex symbols in history, and later romanced screen beauties Catherine Deneuve and Jane Fonda, died Friday at age 72.

“Staying faithful bothers me,” Vadim once said, by way of explaining his tumultuous, glamour-filled love life. A gifted discoverer of female talent and the director of 26 movies, some of which were considered scandalous in their time, he rejected the label of playboy.

“A playboy is a professional with women,” he said. “Somebody who doesn’t love them but who loves the success he has with them.”

Vadim, whose real name was Roger Vadim Plemiannikov, had long struggled with cancer. He died in a Paris hospital, a local radio station said.

In Vadim’s personal and professional lives alike, female beauty took pride of place. As stars, he cast not only his own celebrated partners but also Angie Dickinson, Jeanne Moreau and Susan Sarandon, among others.

“You wouldn’t ask Rodin to make an ugly sculpture, or me to make a film with an ugly woman,” he once said. “That’s my style, that’s my nature.”

The son of a French diplomat, Vadim married Bardot in 1952, when he was 24 and she was an 18-year-old fashion model. Four years later, after working as a stage actor and a journalist at Paris Match magazine, he cast his wife as the female lead in the first movie he directed, “And God Created Woman.”

The film, about a young bride who craves sexual freedom and falls in love with her brother-in-law, was denounced by the Vatican and banned in several countries. But it launched the international career of the blond, sensuous Bardot, who became so famous that her initials alone were enough to identify her.

“I wanted to show a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved in the way a boy might, without any sense of guilt on a moral or sexual level,” Vadim later explained.

According to historians of French cinema, the movie was a catalyst for the rebellion of young French people in the 1950s against the conservative, church-inspired morals of their parents.

After five years of marriage, Vadim and Bardot divorced.

In 1958, Vadim married a second actress, the Danish Annette Stroyberg, whom he cast in “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” an adaptation of the classic 18th century French novel and another of his movies to cause a scandal. The couple had a daughter but divorced after two years.

When Vadim subsequently met the elegant Catherine Deneuve, she was 17. “We fell in love in an evening,” he later recalled. They lived together but did not wed. He made two films with her, including “Vice and Virtue,” and she bore him a son. But the romance did not last.

In 1965, Vadim married the 27-year-old American actress Jane Fonda in Las Vegas. Most memorably, he cast his third wife as the sexy heroine of the sci-fi fantasy “Barbarella.” They had a daughter, but Vadim ultimately found Fonda to be “a middle-class housewife,” and they parted.

In 1975, he married the least-known of his wives, Catherine Schneider. “The mistake I’ve made is to have made the same women famous whom I married when they were unknown,” he once said ruefully. He and Schneider had a daughter.

In five books, Vadim wrote of his wives and lovers, making judgments that led both Bardot and Deneuve to sue him. In 1987, he made his last movie, a remake of “And God Created Woman” starring Rebecca De Mornay.

In 1996-97, he made two miniseries for French television. He also directed plays on the Paris stage and worked as a producer and writer.

There were critics who took Vadim to task for what they saw as his superficiality and unfulfilled talent, but others found his works elegant and filled with technical proficiency. To people who judged some of his works immoral, Vadim replied that he was attacking the taboos of society.

The longest love affair of his life was his last. In 1990, Vadim married actress Marie-Christine Barrault, who starred in some of his television productions and remained with him until his death.

In addition to Barrault, Vadim is survived by four children: Vanessa, born to Fonda; Christian, born to Deneuve; Nathalie, born to Stroyberg; and Vania, born to Schneider.

Funeral arrangements were pending.