Roger Vadim Dead At 72

(AP)  Roger Vadim, the French film director who launched Brigitte Bardot's career in the classic And God Created Woman and later married Jane Fonda, died Friday after a long struggle with cancer, family friends said. He was 72.

Vadim movies weren't always successful, reports CBS News Correspondent Elaine Cobbe, but he had a flair for revealing new, and beautiful, female talent: as well as Bardot, he launched companion Catherine Deneuve. Vadim cast 26 movies with leading ladies ranging from the elegant Deneuve, his companion between marriages, to earthy Angie Dickinson to intellectual Jeanne Moreau to Susan Sarandon.

Vadim was best-known for the 1956 groundbreaking And God Created Woman about a young married woman's quest for sexual freedom. The film brought Bardot instant fame.

``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 said.

The film defined the content and set the tone for many of Vadim's films, including the 1968 Barbarella, an avant-garde sci-fi romp starring his new wife, Jane Fonda.

Vadim was born Roger Vladimir Plemiannikov on Jan. 26, 1928 in Paris, the son of a vice consul of France. He met Bardot when she was 15. They married in 1952 when she was only 18. He was 24.

Vadim wrote several books including his autobiography, From One Star to the Next in which he described his marriages to Bardot and Fonda. He was also married to Annette Stroyberg and Catherine Schneider.

His is survived by his wife, actress Marie-Christine Barrault, and four children: Vanessa, born to Fonda; Christian, born to Deneuve; Nathalie, born to Stroyberg; and Vania, born to Schneider.

Funeral arrangements were pending.



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