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During PBS’ AMERICAN EXPERIENCE “McCarthy” session at the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour in Beverly Hills, CA on Tuesday, July 30, 2019, New Yorker staff writer and Columbia University journalism professor Jelani Cobb, writer, director and producer Sharon Grimberg, author of A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy David M. Oshinsky and series senior producer Susan Bellows uncovered the rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Senator who would test the limits of American decency and democracy.
(Premieres January 7, 2020)
All photos in this set should be credited to Rahoul Ghose/PBS
11th Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Rovaniemi.
Finland hosts the 11th Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting on 7 May in Rovaniemi. Minister-level representatives from the eight Arctic States will convene to review and approve work completed under the two-year Finnish Chairmanship to improve sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic.
Ministry for Foreign Affairs provides photo material for media representatives, participants and organisers of the meeting. Please feel free to use the photos, considering the following restrictions: Not for commercial purposes nor reselling. When publishing the pictures, the name of the photographer and organization shall be mentioned as the source. No picture manipulation is permitted. The holder of the picture rights and/or the organisation shall at all times retain the copyright to the picture. When publishing the pictures, the publisher shall ensure the legality of the context where the pictures are used, obtain the permissions and consents required for their publication, and observe the generally established practices and decency. The publisher shall ensure that publication of the pictures does not insult anyone’s privacy or dignity.
Photo: Jouni Porsanger / Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland
And God Created Woman (French: Et Dieu... créa la femme) is a 1956 French romantic drama film directed by Roger Vadim in his directorial debut and starring Brigitte Bardot. Though not her first film, it is widely recognized as the vehicle that launched Bardot into the public spotlight and immediately created her "sex kitten" persona, making her an overnight sensation.
When the film was released in the United States by Kingsley-International Pictures in 1957, it pushed the boundaries of the representation of sexuality in American cinema, and most available prints of the film were heavily edited to conform with the Hays Code censorial standards.[citation needed] Filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich credited it for "breaking French cinema out of U.S. art houses and into the mainstream and thereby inadvertently also paving the way for the takeover in France of the New Wave filmmakers."[5]
A poorly-received English-language remake, also titled And God Created Woman, was directed by Vadim and released in 1988.
Plot
Juliette is an 18-year-old orphan in Saint-Tropez, France,[6][7] with a high level of sexual energy. She makes no effort to restrain her natural sensuality – lying nude in her yard, habitually kicking her shoes off and stalking about barefoot, and disregarding many societal conventions and the opinions of others. This behavior causes a stir and attracts the attention of most of the men around her.
Her first suitor is the much older and wealthy Eric Carradine. He wants to build a new casino in Saint-Tropez, but his plans are blocked by a small shipyard on the stretch of land which he needs for the development; the shipyard is owned by the Tardieu family.
Antoine, the eldest of the three Tardieu brothers, returns home for the weekend to hear Carradine's proposal and Juliette is waiting for him to take her away with him. His intentions are short-term, and he spurns her by leaving Saint-Tropez without her.
U.S theatrical advertisement, 9 April 1958
Tiring of her outrageous behavior, Juliette's guardians threaten to send her back to the orphanage, which will confine her until she is 21. To keep her in town, Carradine pleads unsuccessfully with Antoine to marry her. His infatuated and naive younger brother Michel sees his opportunity and proposes marriage to Juliette. Despite her love for Antoine, she accepts.
When Antoine is contracted to return home and work for Carradine, Juliette's behavior becomes increasingly disrespectful of her husband. In a huff, she takes one of the family's boats. When it develops engine trouble, she has to be saved by Antoine. While they are washed up together on a wild beach, she seduces him.
Juliette begins acting bizarrely. She takes to her bed, claiming to have a fever. She tells Christian, the youngest Tardieu brother, that she had sex with Antoine on the beach. When Madame Tardieu, mother of the three boys, hears about it, she tells Michel that he has to dump Juliette promptly. Michel goes to their room to talk with Juliette, but she has gone off to the Bar des Amis to drink and dance.
Michel tries to go looking for her, but Antoine locks him inside, telling him to forget her. Michel fights his brother for the key and heads out after Juliette.
Eric has been alerted that Juliette is making a spectacle of herself and comes to the bar to collect her. Juliette refuses to leave with him. Michel arrives but Juliette refuses to talk with him and continues her improvised and sexually suggestive dancing. When she ignores Michel's order to stop, Michel shoots at her. Eric steps in and is slightly wounded. Antoine offers to drive Eric to a doctor and they leave. Michel angrily slaps Juliette four times. She only smiles at him with satisfaction that she has provoked him to this behavior. En route to the doctor, Eric tells Antoine that he is going to reassign him to work elsewhere to put some distance between him and Michel and Juliette. He says: "That girl was made to destroy men". In the final scene, Michel and Juliette walk home together, hand in hand.
Cast
Brigitte Bardot as Juliette Hardy
Curd Jürgens as Éric Carradine
Jean-Louis Trintignant as Michel Tardieu
Marie Glory as Mme. Tardieu
Georges Poujouly as Christian Tardieu
Christian Marquand as Antoine Tardieu
Jane Marken as Madame Morin
Jean Tissier as M. Vigier-Lefranc
Isabelle Corey as Lucienne
Jacqueline Ventura as Mme Vigier-Lefranc
Jacques Ciron as The Secretary of Éric
Paul Faivre as M. Morin
Jany Mourey as The Orphanage Representative
Philippe Grenier as Perri
Jean Lefebvre as The Man who wanted to dance
Leopoldo Francés as The Dancer
Jean Toscano as René
Production
By the mid-1950s Roger Vadim was an established screenwriter and had written several movies starring his then wife Brigitte Bardot. Producer Raoul Levy wanted Vadim to write and direct a film starring Bardot, and suggested he adapt the book The Little Genius by Maurice Garçon. Vadim disliked the book and came up with a new story, one based on a trial of a woman who had been the mistress of three different brothers, and who killed one of them. Vadim was particularly taken with the attitude of the woman towards her lovers, the jury and the police. Levy liked Vadim's idea and obtained finance.[8]
Levy succeeded in raising finance from Columbia, who would provide color and CinemaScope provided Curd Jurgens was given a role. The parts of the brothers had already been cast so Vadim rewrote the script in two days to expand the part of an arms dealer so it could be offered to Jurgens.[8]
Reception
Box office
The film was a big hit in France, one of the ten most popular films at the British box-office in its year of release[9] and the biggest foreign-language film ever in the United States at the time.[10] The film earned $4 million in the U.S. (grossing $12 million), and a further $21 million around the globe.[2][3]
The film was extremely popular in Kansas City, where it played for a year at the Kimo Theatre, grossing over $100,000, a record for Kansas City at the time.[11] In Europe, this movie smashed attendance records from Norway to the Middle East.[12] It earned for France over $8 million, more than France's biggest export — "the Renault Dauphine".[13]
In the United States the film was released by Kingsley-International, a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures as Columbia was forbidden to release a film with nudity and adult themes. The Catholic Legion of Decency gave it a "C" for "Condemned" rating. A Columbia spokesman stated that the film would have received twice as many bookings with a less restrictive "B" rating, but would only have done half the business.[14] Variety reported that in spite of the rating, the film broke "local records at the Paris Theatre, N.Y., and at other houses where it has played", and noted that "In Fitchburg, Mass., it actually outgrossed Ten Commandments."[15]
Author Peter Lev describes the film's impact in America:
And God Created Woman's impact on the film industry was significant. New Bardot films were eagerly snapped up by distributors, and old Bardot films were released or re-released. Prices for distribution rights to foreign films escalated overall.[16]
Critical response
When the film was released in the United States, Bosley Crowther, the film critic for The New York Times, found Brigitte Bardot attractive but the film lacking and was not able to recommend it. He wrote: "Bardot moves herself in a fashion that fully accentuates her charms. She is undeniably a creation of superlative craftsmanship. But that's the extent of the transcendence, for there is nothing sublime about the script of this completely single-minded little picture. ...We can't recommend this little item as a sample of the best in Gallic films. It is clumsily put together and rather bizarrely played. There is nothing more than sultry fervor in the performance of Mlle. Bardot, and Christian Marquand and Jean-Louis Trintignant are mainly heavy-breathers as her men".[17]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_God_Created_Woman_(1956_film)
Film critic Dennis Schwartz wrote: "The breezy erotic drama was laced with some thinly textured sad moments that hardly resonated as serious drama. But as slight as the story was it was always lively and easy to take on the eyes, adding up to hardly anything more than a bunch of snapshots of Bardot posturing as a sex kitten in various stages of undress. The public loved it and it became a big box-office smash, and paved the way for a spate of sexy films to follow. What was more disturbing than its dullish dialogue and flaunting of Bardot as a sex object, was that underneath its call for liberation was a reactionary and sexist view of sex."[18]
Rotten Tomatoes reports a 69% approval rating based on 13 reviews, with an average rating of 6.4/10.[19]
Censorship
When released in the United States, the film was condemned by the National Legion of Decency.[20]
Police made attempts to suppress its screening in the U.S.[21][22]
Saint-Tropez (/ˌsæn troʊˈpeɪ, - trəˈ-/ SAN troh-PAY, - trə-,[4][5] French: [sɛ̃ tʁɔpe]; Provençal: Sant Tropetz [san(t) tʀuˈpes]) is a commune in the Var department and the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, Southern France. It is 68 kilometres (42 miles) west of Nice and 100 kilometres (62 miles) east of Marseille, on the French Riviera, of which it is one of the best-known towns. In 2018, Saint-Tropez had a population of 4,103. The adjacent narrow body of water is the Gulf of Saint-Tropez (French: Golfe de Saint-Tropez), stretching to Sainte-Maxime to the north under the Massif des Maures.
Saint-Tropez was a military stronghold and fishing village until the beginning of the 20th century. It was the first town on its coast to be liberated during World War II as part of Operation Dragoon. After the war, it became an internationally known seaside resort, renowned principally because of the influx of artists of the French New Wave in cinema and the Yé-yé movement in music. It later became a resort for the European and American jet set and tourists.
History
Aerial view of Saint-Tropez, with Pampelonne beach in background and the citadel and the port in the foreground
Citadel of Saint-Tropez
Map of Saint-Tropez (c. 1680)
In 599 BC, the Phocaeans from Ionia founded Massilia (present-day Marseille) and established other coastal mooring sites in the area. Through the writings of Roman historian and military commander Pliny the Elder, it was found that Saint-Tropez was known in ancient times as Athenopolis and that it belonged to the Massilians.[6] In 31 BC, the Romans invaded the region. Their citizens built many opulent villas in the area, including one known as the "Villa des Platanes" (Villa of the Plane Trees). The closest settlement to Saint-Tropez in antiquity is attested as Heraclea-Caccabaria, today Cavalaire-sur-Mer, situated on the southern end of the peninsula, while the gulf of Saint-Tropez was called sinus Sambracitanus, which likely survives in the settlement name of Les Issambres.[7]
The town owes its current name to the early Christian martyr Saint Torpes. Legend tells of his decapitation at Pisa during Nero's reign, with his body placed in a rotten boat along with a rooster and a dog. The body purportedly landed at the present-day location of the town of Saint-Tropez.[8][9][10]
Toward the end of the ninth century, long after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, pirates and privateers began a hundred years of attacks and sackings. In the tenth century, the village of La Garde-Freinet was founded 15 km (9 mi) to the north of Saint-Tropez. From 890 to 972, Saint-Tropez and its surroundings became an Arab Muslim colony dominated by the nearby Saracenic settlement of Fraxinet;[11][12] in 940, Saint-Tropez was controlled by Nasr ibn Ahmad.[12] From 961 to 963, Adalbert, son of Berengar, the pretender to the throne of Lombardy who was pursued by Otto I, hid at Saint-Tropez.[12] In 972, the Muslims of Saint-Tropez held Maïeul, the abbot of Cluny, for ransom.[12]
In 976, William I, Count of Provence, Lord of Grimaud, began attacking the Muslims, and in 980 he built a tower where the Suffren tower now stands. In 1079 and 1218, Papal bulls mentioned the existence of a manor at Saint-Tropez.
Saint-Tropez "le vieux port" (the old port)
From 1436, Count René I (the "good King René") tried to repopulate Provence. He created the Barony of Grimaud and appealed to the Genoan Raphael de Garezzio, a wealthy gentleman who had sent a fleet of caravels carrying 60 Genoese families to the area. In return, Count René promised to exempt the citizens from taxation. On 14 February 1470, Jean de Cossa, Baron of Grimaud and Grand Seneschal of Provence, agreed that the Genoan could build city walls and two large towers, which still stand: one tower is at the end of the Grand Môle and the other is at the entrance to the Ponche.
The city became a small republic with its own fleet and army and was administered by two consuls and 12 elected councillors. In 1558, the city's captain Honorat Coste was empowered to protect the city. The captain led a militia and mercenaries who successfully resisted attacks by the Turks and Spanish, succored Fréjus and Antibes and helped the Archbishop of Bordeaux regain control of the Lérins Islands.
In 1577, the daughter of the Marquis Lord of Castellane, Genevieve de Castilla, married Jean-Baptiste de Suffren, Marquis de Saint-Cannet, Baron de La Môle, and advisor to the parliament of Provence. The lordship of Saint-Tropez became the prerogative of the De Suffren family. One of the most notable members of this family was the later vice-admiral Pierre André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez (1729–1788), veteran of the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War.
In September 1615, Saint-Tropez was visited by a delegation led by the Japanese samurai Hasekura Tsunenaga that was on its way to Rome but was forced by weather to stop in the town. This may have been the first contact between the French and the Japanese.
Bust of Saint-Tropez during the Bravades
The local noblemen were responsible for raising an army that repulsed a fleet of Spanish galleons on 15 June 1637; Les Bravades des Espagnols, a local religious and military celebration, commemorates this victory of the Tropezian militia.[13] Count René's promise in 1436 to not tax the citizens of Saint-Tropez was honored until 1672, when Louis XIV abrogated it as he imposed French control.
The Gulf of Saint-Tropez was known as the Gulf of Grimaud until the end of the 19th century.
During the 1920s, Saint-Tropez attracted famous figures from the fashion world such as Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. During World War II, the landing on 15 August 1944 began the Allied invasion of southern France, Operation Dragoon. In the 1950s, Saint-Tropez became internationally renowned as the setting for such films as And God Created Woman, which starred French actress Brigitte Bardot.
In May 1965, an Aérospatiale Super Frelon pre-production aircraft crashed in the gulf, killing its pilot.
On 4 March 1970, the French submarine Eurydice, with its home port as Saint-Tropez, disappeared in the Mediterranean with 57 crew aboard after a mysterious explosion.
The motto of Saint-Tropez is Ad usque fidelis, Latin for "faithful to the end". After the Dark Age of plundering the French Riviera, Raphaël de Garesio landed in Saint-Tropez on 14 February 1470, with 22 men, simple peasants or sailors who had left the overcrowded Italian Riviera. They rebuilt and repopulated the area, and in exchange were granted by a representative of the "good king", Jean de Cossa, Baron of Grimaud and Seneschal of Provence, various privileges, including some previously reserved exclusively for lords, such as exemptions from taxes status and the right to bear arms. About ten years later, a great wall with towers stood watch to protect the new houses from sea and land attack; some 60 families formed the new community. On 19 July 1479, the new Home Act was signed, "the rebirth charter of Saint-Tropez".[14]
Climate
Saint-Tropez has a hot-summer mediterranean climate with mild winters and hot summers, although daytime temperatures are somewhat moderated by its coastal position.
Climate data for Saint-Tropez
MonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecYear
Mean daily maximum °C (°F)12.1
(53.8)12.6
(54.7)14.3
(57.7)16.5
(61.7)19.7
(67.5)23.4
(74.1)27.0
(80.6)27.3
(81.1)24.3
(75.7)20.2
(68.4)15.6
(60.1)13.0
(55.4)18.8
(65.8)
Daily mean °C (°F)9.3
(48.7)9.6
(49.3)11.0
(51.8)13.2
(55.8)16.3
(61.3)20.0
(68.0)23.3
(73.9)23.4
(74.1)20.8
(69.4)17.1
(62.8)12.8
(55.0)10.3
(50.5)15.6
(60.1)
Mean daily minimum °C (°F)6.5
(43.7)6.6
(43.9)7.8
(46.0)9.8
(49.6)13.0
(55.4)16.5
(61.7)19.5
(67.1)17.3
(63.1)14.1
(57.4)9.9
(49.8)7.5
(45.5)6.0
(42.8)12.3
(54.1)
Average precipitation mm (inches)82.4
(3.24)82.8
(3.26)64.7
(2.55)53.2
(2.09)40.1
(1.58)25.7
(1.01)15.5
(0.61)27.8
(1.09)57.0
(2.24)104.9
(4.13)85.7
(3.37)72.2
(2.84)711.8
(28.02)
Mean monthly sunshine hours147.8148.9203.2252.1234.9280.6310.3355.5319.5247.0201.5145.52,748.1
Source: Climatologie mensuelle à la station de Cap Camarat.[15]
Economy
The Hôtel Byblos is a Grand Hotel built in the mid-1960s.
The main economic resource of Saint-Tropez is tourism. The city is well known for the Hôtel Byblos and for Les Caves du Roy, a member of the Leading Hotels of the World; its 1967 inauguration featuring Brigitte Bardot and Gunter Sachs was an international event.
Beaches
Tropezian Tahiti beach in 2011
Tropezian beaches are located along the coast in the Baie de Pampelonne, which lies south of Saint-Tropez and east of Ramatuelle. Pampelonne offers a collection of beaches along its five-kilometre shore. Each beach is around 30 metres wide with its own beach hut and private or public tanning area.
Many of the beaches offer windsurfing, sailing and canoeing equipment for rent, while others offer motorized water sports, such as power boats, jet bikes, water skiing and scuba diving. Some of the beaches are naturist beaches. There are also many exclusive beach clubs that are popular among wealthy people from around the world.
Toplessness and nudity
Saint-Tropez's Tahiti Beach, which had been popularised in the film And God Created Woman featuring Brigitte Bardot, emerged as a clothing-optional destination,[16] but the mayor of Saint-Tropez ordered police to ban toplessness and to watch over the beach via helicopter.[17] The "clothing fights" between the gendarmerie and nudists become the main topic of a famous French comedy film series, Le gendarme de Saint-Tropez (The Troops of St. Tropez) featuring Louis de Funès. In the end, the nudist side prevailed.[18] Topless sunbathing is now the norm for both men and women from Pampelonne beaches to yachts in the centre of Saint-Tropez port.[19] The Tahiti beach is now clothing-optional, but nudists often head to private nudist beaches, such as that in Cap d'Agde.[20]
Port
Saint Tropez Port view
Aerial view of Saint-Tropez
The port was widely used during the 18th century; in 1789 it was visited by 80 ships. Saint-Tropez's shipyards built tartanes and three-masted ships that could carry 1,000 to 12,200 barrels. The town was the site of various associated trades, including fishing, cork, wine and wood. The town had a school of hydrography. In 1860, the flagship of the merchant navy, named The Queen of the Angels (La Reine des Anges, a three-masted ship of 740 barrels capacity), was built at Saint-Tropez.
Its role as a commercial port declined, and it is now primarily a tourist spot and a base for many well-known sail regattas. There is fast boat transportation with Les Bateaux Verts to Sainte-Maxime on the other side of the bay and to Port Grimaud, Marines de Cogolin, Les Issambres and St-Aygulf.
Events
Les Bravades de Saint-Tropez
Les Bravades de Saint-Tropez is an annual celebration held in the middle of May when people of the town celebrate their patron saint, Torpes of Pisa, and their military achievements. One of the oldest traditions of Provence, it has been held for more than 450 years since the citizens of Saint-Tropez were first given special permission to form a militia to protect the town from the Barbary pirates. During the three-day celebration, the various militias in costumes of the time fire their muskets into the air at traditional stops, march to the sound of bands and parade St. Torpes's bust. The townspeople also attend a mass wearing traditional Provençal costume.
Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez
Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez
Each year, at the end of September, a regatta is held in the bay of Saint-Tropez (Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez). Many yachts are entered, some as long as 50 metres. Many tourists come to the location for this event, or as a stop on their trip to Cannes, Marseille or Nice.
Traditional dishes
The Tarte tropézienne is a traditional cake invented by a Polish confectioner who had set up shop in Saint-Tropez in the mid-1950s, and made famous by actress Brigitte Bardot.[21]
Demographics
Historical population
YearPop.±% p.a.
17933,629—
18003,156−1.98%
18063,319+0.84%
18213,360+0.08%
18313,736+1.07%
18363,637−0.54%
18413,538−0.55%
18463,647+0.61%
18513,595−0.29%
18563,640+0.25%
18613,558−0.45%
18663,739+1.00%
18723,532−0.94%
18763,531−0.01%
18813,545+0.08%
18863,636+0.51%
18913,533−0.57%
18963,599+0.37%
YearPop.±% p.a.
19013,704+0.58%
19063,708+0.02%
19113,704−0.02%
19213,842+0.37%
19264,324+2.39%
19314,589+1.20%
19364,102−2.22%
19464,161+0.14%
19544,925+2.13%
19625,668+1.77%
19686,130+1.31%
19755,427−1.73%
19826,213+1.95%
19905,754−0.95%
19995,444−0.61%
20075,640+0.44%
20124,452−4.62%
20174,352−0.45%
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. Updates on reimplementing the Graph extension, which will be known as the Chart extension, can be found on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
Source: EHESS[22] and INSEE[23]
Infrastructure
Transport to and from Saint-Tropez
By sea
Saint-Tropez marina
The 800-berth port with two marinas hosts boats, including ferries. In the summer season, there is a ferry service between St-Tropez and Nice, Sainte-Maxime, Cannes, Saint-Raphaël.[24] Private yachts may also be chartered.
By air
There is no airport in Saint-Tropez, but there is a charter service to and from clubs, the town and Tropezian beaches by helicopter.[25] The nearest airport is La Môle – Saint-Tropez Airport located in La Môle, 15 km (9 mi) (8 NM) southwest of Saint-Tropez.[26] Other main airports are Nice Côte d'Azur Airport located approximately 95 kilometers and Toulon–Hyères Airport located approximately 52 kilomters from Saint-Tropez.[27] Marseille Provence Airport is located approximately 158 kilometres from Saint-Tropez.[28]
By land
There is no rail station in Saint-Tropez. The nearest station is Saint-Raphaël-Valescure, located in Saint-Raphaël (39 km (24 mi) from Saint-Tropez), which also offers a boat service to Saint-Tropez.[29] There is also direct bus service to Saint-Tropez, and the rail station is connected with bus station.[30][31]
There is a bus station in Saint-Tropez called the Gare routière de Saint-Tropez, located in Place Blanqui.[32] It is operated by Var department transport division Varlib [fr], which employs other transport companies to operate routes.
There are taxi services, including from Nice airport to Saint-Tropez, but they are expensive because of the long distances and the area's wealth.[31]
In the tourist season, traffic problems may be expected on roads to Saint-Tropez,[33] so the fastest way to travel is by scooter or bike. There is no direct highway to the village. There are three main roads to Saint-Tropez:
Via the A8 (E80) with the sign "Draguignan, Le Muy-Golfe de Saint-Tropez" – RD 25 Sainte-Maxime, 19 km (12 mi) -> on the former RN 98 – 12 km (7 mi).
A57 with the sign "The Cannet des Maures" -> DR 558, 24 km (15 mi) Grimaud until then by the RD 61 – 9 km (6 mi) through the famous intersection of La Foux.
Near the sea, the former RN 98 connects to Toulon-La Valette-du-Var, Saint-Raphaël, Cannes, Nice, Monaco, DR 93, called "Beach Road", with destinations to Pampelonne, Ramatuelle and La Croix – Valmer.
Town transport
Public transport in Saint-Tropez includes minibuses, providing shuttle service between town and Pampelonne beaches.[27]
Other means of transport include scooters, cars, bicycles and taxis.[34] There are also helicopter services[35] and boat trips.[36]
Because of traffic and short distances, walking is an obvious choice for trips around town and to the Tropezian beaches.[37]
Culture, education and sport
Paul Signac, Leaving the port of Saint-Tropez, 1901
A panoramic view of Saint-Tropez by Paul Leduc [fr] (1876–1943)
Paintings Galerie Ivan
The town has health facilities, a cinema, a library, an outdoor center and a recreation center for youth.[38]
Schools include: École maternelle (kindergarten – preschool) – l'Escouleto, écoles primaires (primary schools – primary education): Louis Blanc and Les Lauriers, collège d'enseignement secondaire (secondary school, high school – secondary education) – Moulin Blanc.[39][40]
There are more than 1,000 students distributed among kindergartens, primary schools and one high school.[41] In 2011, there were 275 students in high school and 51 people employed there, of whom 23 were teachers.[42]
Art
Saint-Tropez plays a major role in the history of modern art. Paul Signac discovered this light-filled place that inspired painters such as Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Albert Marquet to come to Saint-Tropez. The painting styles of pointillism and fauvism emerged in Saint-Tropez. Saint-Tropez was also attractive for the next generation of painters: Bernard Buffet, David Hockney, Massimo Campigli and Donald Sultan lived and worked there. Today, Stefan Szczesny continues this tradition.
The contemporary artist Philippe Shangti imagined the design of Le Quai and L'Opera, restaurants located on the port of Saint-Tropez where he also exhibits his art collections. Centered on a specific theme, he always denounces different problems affecting society with provocative artworks.[43]
International relations
See also: List of twin towns and sister cities in France
Saint-Tropez is twinned with:
Vittoriosa, Malta[44][45]
Famous persons connected with Saint-Tropez
Saint Torpes of Pisa
Saint Torpes of Pisa
Portrait of Hasekura Tsunenaga
Portrait of Hasekura Tsunenaga
Statue of Admiral de Suffren de Saint-Tropez
Statue of Admiral de Suffren de Saint-Tropez
Brigitte Bardot at Saint-Tropez, 1963
Brigitte Bardot at Saint-Tropez, 1963
Louis de Funès during filming
Louis de Funès during filming
The most famous persons connected with Saint-Tropez include the semi-legendary martyr who gave his name to the town, Saint Torpes of Pisa; Hasekura Tsunenaga, probably the first Japanese in Europe, who landed in Saint-Tropez in 1615; a hero of the American Revolutionary War, Admiral Pierre André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez; the icon of modern Saint-Tropez, Brigitte Bardot, who started the clothes-optional revolution and still lives in the Saint-Tropez area;[46] Louis de Funès, who played the character of the gendarme (police officer) in the French comedy film series Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez and also helped establish the international image of Saint-Tropez as both a quiet town and a modern jet-set holiday target.[47]
In popular culture
The English rock band Pink Floyd wrote a song "San Tropez" after the town. Saint-Tropez was also mentioned in David Gates's 1978 hit "Took the Last Train", Kraftwerk's "Tour de France", Aerosmith's "Permanent Vacation", Taylor Swift's "The Man", and Beyoncé's "Energy". Rappers including Diddy, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, J. Cole, and Post Malone refer to the city in some of their songs as a favorite vacation destination, usually reached by yacht. DJ Antoine wrote a song "Welcome to St. Tropez". The Tony Award-winning Broadway musical La Cage aux Folles is set in a drag night club in St. Tropez. Furthermore, Bulgarian singer azis wrote a song named "Сен Тропе"(Sen Trope). Also, Romanian singer Florin Salam wrote the song (Saint Tropez). Saint Tropez was also mentioned in Army of Lovers' song "My Army of Lovers." Their song "La Plage De Saint Tropez" was also dedicated to this town.
Gallery
Aerial view of the Cital of Saint-Tropez, France
Aerial view of the Cital of Saint-Tropez, France
Cannons of the Citadel
Cannons of the Citadel
Tour Jarlier
Tour Jarlier
Aerial view of the old town and the old port of Saint-Tropez, France
Aerial view of the old town and the old port of Saint-Tropez, France
Luxury boats
Luxury boats
Sailboats
Sailboats
Aerial view of Pampelonne Beach, Saint-Tropez
Aerial view of Pampelonne Beach, Saint-Tropez
Harbour promenade with cafes
Harbour promenade with cafes
Aerial view of vineyards in Saint-Tropez, France
Aerial view of vineyards in Saint-Tropez, France
Old gendarmerie station; popular spot for photographs[48] (cf. Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez)
Old gendarmerie station; popular spot for photographs[48] (cf. Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez)
Aerial view of the old town of Saint-Tropez, France
Aerial view of the old town of Saint-Tropez, France
Tarte tropézienne (tropezian pie)
Tarte tropézienne (tropezian pie)
The main gate to Citadel
The main gate to Citadel
Top-down aerial of the old town of Saint-Tropez, France
Top-down aerial of the old town of Saint-Tropez, France
Aerial view of the cemetery of Saint-Tropez, France
Aerial view of the cemetery of Saint-Tropez, France
List of media connected with Saint-Tropez
Non-exhaustive filmography
Saint-Tropez, devoir de vacances [fr] (short film, 1952)
Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956)
Bonjour Tristesse (1958)
Une fille pour l'été [fr] (1960)
Saint-Tropez Blues [fr] (1960)
Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez (1964) and its sequels Le Gendarme à New York (1965), Le Gendarme se marie (1968), Le Gendarme en balade (1970), Le Gendarme et les Extra-terrestres (1979) and finally Le Gendarme et les Gendarmettes (1982)[49][50]
La Collectionneuse (1967)
La Chamade (1968)
Les Biches (1968)
La Piscine (1969)
Le Viager (1972)
La Cage aux Folles (1978)
Le Coup du parapluie (1980)
Le Beau Monde [fr] (1981)
West German collector card by Druckerei Hanns Uhrig, Frankfurt a. M. / NF Films. Photo: Pathé-Cinema. Brigitte Bardot in La mariée est trop belle / The Bride Is Much Too Beautiful (Pierre Gaspard-Huit, 1956).
French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) died on 28 December 2025, at the age of 91. In the 1950s, she was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she became an animal rights activist. In the coming weeks, we will continue to post a BB postcard every day to remember her as she once was.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father, and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying to launch a modelling career and found herself on the cover of the French magazine Elle in May 1949. Her incredible beauty was readily apparent, and Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand / Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953, she attended the Cannes Film Festival, where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956, she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as an ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. In 1953, she made her first US production, Un acte d'amour / Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smash success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. The immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the filming of Et Dieu créa la femme / And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), directed by her husband, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at the time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped elevate Brigitte Bardot's international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten', and fascination with her in America consisted of magazine photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theatres like lemmings. BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (Ralph Thomas, 1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne / La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957), which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur / Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "This Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defence attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre can shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous and deadly side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960, postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957, and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre / Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career
Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée / Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle, has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at French Films: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the high point of her career when she agreed to make this film with high-profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess, and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot, and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names was based on an actual incident, and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterwards, Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire Playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men, including Samy Frey, her co-star in La Vérité / The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Jean-Luc Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris / Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) opposite Michel Piccoli. She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres / Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires /Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses / Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewellery and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990s, she was also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal was a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularising bikini swimwear, in such early films as Manina / Woman without a Veil (Willy Rozier, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (French Films), French Films, Wikipedia and IMDb.
And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
The "Elite Rubber Class" race at the end of the night is when people without studded tires take to the ice. Sometimes they shed their clothes and sense of decency too. Always hilarious!
Denton House Party With The League of Fucking Decency and White Rhino; Andy of the Austin bands White Rhino/The Dirty Sound
File name: 06_10_013639
Title: No child has a chance who hasn't been taught to pray and love God. How about your children? American Legion
Created/Published: No child has a chance who hasnât been taught to pray and love God. How about your children? American society may collapse for want of loyalty, decency, honesty and unselfishness. Americans⦠let's give them and America a new chance⦠teach children religion -- American Legion
Date issued: No child has a chance who hasnât been taught to pray and love God. How about your children? American society may collapse for want of loyalty, decency, honesty and unselfishness. Americans⦠let's give them and America a new chance⦠teach children religion -- American Legion - No child has a chance who hasnât been taught to pray and love God. How about your children? American society may collapse for want of loyalty, decency, honesty and unselfishness. Americans⦠let's give them and America a new chance⦠teach children religion -- American Legion (No child has a chance who hasnât been taught to pray and love God. How about your children? American society may collapse for want of loyalty, decency, honesty and unselfishness. Americans⦠let's give them and America a new chance⦠teach children religion -- American Legion)
Physical description: 1 print (postcard) : linen texture, color ; 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.
Genre: No child has a chance who hasnât been taught to pray and love God. How about your children? American society may collapse for want of loyalty, decency, honesty and unselfishness. Americans⦠let's give them and America a new chance⦠teach children religion -- American Legion
Notes: Title from item.
Collection: The Tichnor Brothers Collection
Location: Boston Public Library, Print Department
Rights: No known restrictions
Not strictly a Finsec event, but here's a few photos of the Service and Food Workers' Union Nga Ringa Tota rally in Wellington on International Cleaners Day.
The 'Fair Deal for Cleaners' campaign that this rally is part of aims to provide a voice to the low-waged largely immigrant female workforce, in cities across Australia and New Zealand, who are calling on big property owners to support decency in their workplaces.
Washington DC, The Walter E. Washington Convention Center, the afternoon of March 1, 2015. Around one hundred social justice activists affiliated with Code Pink, Jewish Voice For Justice, AVAAZ, US Campaign To End The Israeli Occupation, Boycott From Within, Answer Coaltion and other peace and faith groups demonstrate in front of the Convention Center to protest the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) yearly DC meeting. AIPAC is regarded by many as the most powerful lobbying group in town. AIPAC has a policy agenda that's out of step with the values of most Jewish Americans and other participants in civilized society but they call the tune because our corrupt political culture is fueled by money, not decency. In an act of peaceful civil disobedience, five demonstrators, all women, were arrested for failing to obey police orders to remove themselves from the granite in front of one of the Convention Center's many doorways. They were given three warnings before being arrested. I photographed one of women as she was being lead away in plastic handcuffs. "I'm a Jewish mother!" she proclaimed. I gave her the 'thumbs up'.
Most of the DC cops kept their cool but when some of the demonstrators got in their face a brief scuffle ensued. Some of us locked arms and and helped lift up one of the Code Pink ladies who was almost knocked down onto the steps by a DC officer who lost it.
To Alex Stehouwer , don't forget I have the right to my own beliefs . Don't act like having the big head that all people in the world stand and think like you , you Godless Christian hater !
Psalm 14:1
"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. "
This verse should best describe yourself.
God deserves the praises. Only demonized person like you can't stand it or even listen neither read it.
If reading through my post of praising God and his goodness is not your cuppa tea , then leave and don't even spend minutes to type a message just to ruin me. But you love to impart such a bad heart to other people , with intention to insult and hurt . You find some satisfaction of such action.
My beliefs are personal and intimate for me . Since I haven’t posted my own views right on your flickr stream , then why were you be angry for what my beliefs are ? It seems your world is getting smaller around you and you can’t understand others have their own different belief system too different than yours.
Do I need to conform with you and post my neutral post to please you. Are you paying my meals or my bills. Be ashamed of yourself and have decency to think before you act.
Your nasty comment posted didn’t go unnoticed. I couldn’t even believe such a person I thought as fine as you is a hypocrite and a bully , that even online you left some projection of what you are in person . Thinking big about yourself ? Such a shame for a man like you who hates God . You can’t even be grateful with the natural air you breathe comes from one creator of the universe who I was giving my praises to . You are so puffed up with self pride , thinking you’ll exist forever in comfort .
If I praise God for the goodness and great things He has done , that’s my personal experience shared , period.
It has nothing to do with you . I don't know you !
I have understood that Christians can’t have the whole world in agreement with us all . In fact someday Christianity will be a minority group . Such concept I have understandably accepted. However, as early days as this , your attitude displays your hate for Christianity and thereby I conclude you are a potentially a great persecutor of Christians someday if you continue to exist with your great anger and hate of God . People deserves to know your attitude problem .
I hope one day when you reach to that very point gasping of your last breathe of air , you may learn to acknowledge there is God who gives and takes that very life you have enjoyed in comfort, yet the same mighty God you've hated .
That ungodliness of you will lead you to die with your lost sinful nature without God if you don't come into repentance to the one living God and accept his son as your savior Jesus Christ.
Ezekiel 3:18-19
" If I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, in order to save his life, that wicked person shall die for his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked, and he does not turn from his wickedness, or from his wicked way, he shall die for his iniquity, but you will have delivered your soul. "
West German postcard by Filmbilder-Vertrieb Ernst Freihoff, Essen, no. 900.
French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) died on 28 December 2025 at the age of 91. In the 1950s, she was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she became an animal rights activist. In the coming weeks, we will continue to post a BB postcard every day to remember her as she once was.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father, and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying to launch a modelling career and found herself on the cover of the French magazine Elle in May 1949. Her incredible beauty was readily apparent, and Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand / Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953, she attended the Cannes Film Festival, where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956, she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as an ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. In 1953, she made her first US production, Un acte d'amour / Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smash success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. The immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the filming of Et Dieu créa la femme / And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), directed by her husband, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at the time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped Brigitte Bardot's international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten', and fascination with her in America consisted of magazine photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theatres like lemmings. BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (Ralph Thomas, 1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne / La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957), which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur / Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "This Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defence attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre can shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous and deadly side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960, postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957, and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre / Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career
Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée / Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle, has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at French Films: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the high point of her career when she agreed to make this film with high-profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess, and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot, and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names was based on an actual incident, and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterwards, Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire Playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men, including Samy Frey, her co-star in La Vérité / The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Jean-Luc Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris / Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) opposite Michel Piccoli. She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres / Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires /Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses / Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewellery and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990s, she was also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal was a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularising bikini swimwear, in such early films as Manina / Woman without a Veil (Willy Rozier, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (French Films), French Films, Wikipedia and IMDb.
And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Washington DC, The Walter E. Washington Convention Center, the afternoon of March 1, 2015. Around one hundred social justice activists affiliated with Code Pink, Jewish Voice For Justice, AVAAZ, US Campaign To End The Israeli Occupation, Boycott From Within, Answer Coaltion and other peace and faith groups demonstrate in front of the Convention Center to protest the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) yearly DC meeting. AIPAC is regarded by many as the most powerful lobbying group in town. AIPAC has a policy agenda that's out of step with the values of most Jewish Americans and other participants in civilized society but they call the tune because our corrupt political culture is fueled by money, not decency. In an act of peaceful civil disobedience, five demonstrators, all women, were arrested for failing to obey police orders to remove themselves from the granite in front of one of the Convention Center's many doorways. They were given three warnings before being arrested. I photographed one of women as she was being lead away in plastic handcuffs. "I'm a Jewish mother!" she proclaimed. I gave her the 'thumbs up'.
Most of the DC cops kept their cool but when some of the demonstrators got in their face a brief scuffle ensued. Some of us locked arms and and helped lift up one of the Code Pink ladies who was almost knocked down onto the steps by a DC officer who lost it.
Description: Page 136 and 137 of the publication "Education" with an article by Julia Ward Howe titled "How far does American Education satisfy the Needs of American Life? Page 5 of 6.
Full Text: ... excitement and appetite, it should lift you into its atmosphere, calm you with its peace. But you, who have bought and paid for it, hold still to all that is frivolous and harmful; to your dressing and flirting, or to your gaming, dining. wining, or worse. The picture is a dead letter in your book of life. But in some instances the possessor of the picture might turn to me and say, A truce to this nonsense. What was this picture painted for? For my money. I bought the artist before I bought the picture." Then, indeed, I should find nothing to say in return.
Can any art hope to repress in woman that passion for personal adornment which every blast of aestheticism seems to fan into a fiercer flame? How can we disabuse a young girl of the illusion which leads her to think that her personal appearance is a theme of inexhaustible interest to mankind at large? What restless demon compels her to turn and turn in an unceasing round of exhibitions, mostly objectless, and with no imaginable rational aim? Like an unhappy whirlwind she sweeps through the -streets, gathering up at each step fresh costumes, fresh combinations of color and material, in fancy if not in fact. Her life is built, not only on the sand, but of it. Behind her it dissipates to nothing.
Can education confer upon men and women the power of self-sacrifice and the grace of self-forgetfulness! Selfhood is at once a great power and a great weakness in humanity. Self-reliance and personal moral conviction are traits of power and of heroism; self-seeking and self-assertion belong to weakness and the unheroic. I believe in the virtues of individuality, but I fear its vices.
Deep thought and deep study lead away from these arid regions of the mind, these deserts in which nothing substantial will take root. Has our education no subsoil plough to pierce the crust of habit and circumstance, and reach the under stratum of character in which, if anywhere, lies the generative power of ideas? How can we lead the thoughtless to think? how so interest them in the things of thought that they shall apply themselves to the most painful and precious of arts, that of thinking rightly and sufficiently?
Disproportionate, ill-directed ambitions spring perhaps from the size of our immense country. "Shall I, an American, be no bigger than the denizen of some territory smaller than the smallest of the United States?" There may follow dreams of large reputation, of extraordinary recognition, etc. But nobody ever did or ever will achieve greatness in this flighty way. Its secret remains a secret to the vain and impatient.
Incompatibilities. -The life of the individual is very brief. The personality of the individual is very small. We are allied on one side to the infinite and immortal, but we attain its objects best by working with patient zeal at the duties nearest to us and most obvious to all. Life is too short to combine sense with nonsense, the frivolous with the solid. Recreation helps the most laborious career, but dissipation brings to naught the happiest gifts and the most brilliant undertakings. The milliner's block will not help the painter's easel. The 'devotee of small wit will not attain the elevation of philosophic thought. The kingdom of heaven is present with us on earth; but a human prophet has neither place nor function in it.
Whence comes that want of confidence in American institutions which often strikes us in the utterances alike of private individuals and of writers in our public prints? I shall not throw the blame of this upon our native teachers; but I will ask them to bear in mind both the fact itself and the source from which I derive it, as dangers against which provision should be made.
The literary offices of our country are largely administered by foreigners, whom we have made Americans as to their political rights and privileges, but whose opinions and" convictions, formed in an atmosphere widely different from our own, we have not been able to Americanize. These persons have the education of their own class, usually not a governing one, in their own country. They have not had the education which would enable them to lead all classes here in a normal direction. Here an Irish editor has twisted a whole generation of young Americans into the narrowness of the prejudices which he brought with him to these shores, and which have never left him. Here is a German holding a position of great responsibility in our Federal government. There are hosts of other Germans, filling out papers with German views of American literature and of American policy. The black guardism which the New York" Herald" has done its best to outgrow was that of a low-lived Celt, whose ideas of decency and propriety received their full expression in that paper as it used to be. Offices of tuition are largely, though not so largely, in the hands of foreigners. Within the last twenty years a reaction has made itself felt in favor of American education for American men and women; yet one may fear that in the time preceding this, much partial and superannuated prejudice may have been planted in a soil which bears what it does bear largely and generously. It would be thankless and absurd for us to say that this participation of European immigrants in our most important work has brought us nothing but harm. Our educators are bound to recognize the intellectual...
Date: 1881
Creator: Education
Format: text
Digital Identifier: AG28-13a-5
Biographical note: Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) was an author, lecturer, poet, activist, abolitionist and leader in the Women's suffrage movement. Born in New York City to affluent parents, Ward Howe was well educated but expected to be a wife. In 1843 Ward Howe married Samuel Gridley Howe the founding director of Perkins after meeting him at a tour of the school. Despite conventional expectations that she not live a public life she initially published work anonymously before becoming a social activist that wrote, spoke, and worked for many social causes. She is commonly known for writing the words to “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and in 1908, she became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts. In 1988 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
Source: Hale, Jen. (2022) ”Julia Ward Howe”. Hale, Jen. “Julia Ward Howe” Perkins Archives Blog, Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown MA, October 26, 2022
Rights: Samuel P. Hayes Research Library, Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown, MA
Last week for a change this was a DRS liveried FL 66 with several wagons in tow. This week - normal service is resumed with a light engine move from Aldwarke to Crewe passing Tinsley at speed, but unlike the previous sister loco 66621 15 minutes earlier at least the sun had the decency to be out.
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Dutch postcard by Uitg. Takken, Utrecht, no. AX 4002. Photo: N.V. City Film, Den Haag. Brigitte Bardot and Henri Vidal in Une Parisienne/ La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957).
French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) died on 28 December 2025, at the age of 91. In the 1950s, she was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she became an animal rights activist. In the coming weeks, we will continue to post a BB postcard every day to remember her as she once was.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father, and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying to launch a modelling career and found herself on the cover of the French magazine Elle in May 1949. Her incredible beauty was readily apparent, and Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand / Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953, she attended the Cannes Film Festival, where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956, she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as an ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. In 1953, she made her first US production, Un acte d'amour / Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smash success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. The immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the filming of Et Dieu créa la femme / And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), directed by her husband, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at the time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped Brigitte Bardot's international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten', and fascination with her in America consisted of magazine photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theatres like lemmings. BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (Ralph Thomas, 1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne / La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957), which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur / Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "This Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defence attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre can shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous and deadly side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960, postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957, and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre / Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career
Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée / Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle, has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at French Films: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the high point of her career when she agreed to make this film with high-profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess, and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot, and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names was based on an actual incident, and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterwards, Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire Playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men, including Samy Frey, her co-star in La Vérité / The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Jean-Luc Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris / Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) opposite Michel Piccoli. She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres / Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires /Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses / Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewellery and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990s, she was also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal was a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularising bikini swimwear, in such early films as Manina / Woman without a Veil (Willy Rozier, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (French Films), French Films, Wikipedia and IMDb.
And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Sikhism originated in the 15th century, in the Punjab region by Guru Nanak, who preached ideas that were radical for his age: he denounced Hinduism's oppressive caste system and Islam's gender discrimination, preaching that all people can commune with the divine equally, without the intervention of rituals or priests. The Sikh faith is a monotheistic religion, meaning Sikhs worship one God. The three core pillars of Sikhism are: vaṇḍ chakkō (sharing with others, helping those in need, as well as participating as part of a community), kirat karō (earning/making a living honestly, without exploitation or fraud, and speaking the truth at all times) and naam japna (meditating on God’s name to live a life of decency and humility).
The temporary distractions of the material world are seen as an illusion. The qualities of ego, anger, greed, attachment and lust are known as the Five Thieves that rob a person of their ability to realize their oneness with God and creation. Sikhs work to counteract the temptations of these qualities through the values of service, equality, and seeking justice for all. Sikhs also believe that one’s form on Earth is only a temporary vessel for the eternal soul. Thus, the death of the physical body is a natural part of the life cycle, while the soul remains. Death is not an end, but merely the progression of the soul on its journey toward God.
Nine more gurus succeeded Guru Nanak (Angad, Amar Das, Ram Das, Arjan, Har Gobind, Har Rai, Har Krishan, Tegh Bahadur, and Gobind Singh), and continued to spread his teachings across the world.
The last guru, Guru Gobind Singh, named the Sikh sacred text, the Guru Granth Sahib, to be the eternal Guru that would guide the Sikhs going forward. It consists of 1,430 Anks, or pages, and 6,000 Sabads, or line compositions, all are written in poetic verse and are aligning to the rhythmic forms of ancient north Indian classical music. At the core of the Guru Granth Sahib is a yearning for a world governed by divine justice, without oppression of any kind.
The final living guru, Gobind Singh, also established the Khalsa, or order of Sikh soldier-saints. They are recognizable by "The 5 k's," their physical articles of faith: Kesh (unshorn hair and beard), Kirpan (ceremonial sword), Kangha (comb), Kara (steel bracelet) and Kachha (drawers). The Dastar, or turban, is considered a spiritual crown, a token of remembrance of the Sikh principles.
Subathu, Himachal Pradesh, India
Double Indemnity II from the CineManArt series by ArtGraeco.
Double Indemnity is a 1944 American film noir about adultery, corruption and murder, directed by Billy Wilder and re-framed here by ArtGraeco.
CineManArt is a series of photomontages, collages and digital art by ArtGraeco that recast characters of mainstream movies, change scenarios and subvert plots. These up-stagings add new dimensions – some solemn, others playful – to the stereotypes, the intolerance and homophobia cinema portrayed for over 100 years of filmmaking.
The CineManArt series by Artgraeco depicts what cinema could be and could have been more of: open, daring, defiant, fair, inclusive.
The homoeroticism here speaks to the tensions and desires that flow between those of the same gender.
ArtGraeco expresses mainly gay aesthetics and homoerotic themes -narratives, photography, collage and digital photo art on homosexuality | politics | history | nostalgia | longings | masculinity | femininity | homophobia | stereotypes | …
More information on art by Graeco at www.artgraeco.com.
The images and all posts do not belong to the public domain. All copyright and reproduction rights are retained by the artist. Copyright © ArtGraeco. All rights reserved.
Sikhism originated in the 15th century, in the Punjab region by Guru Nanak, who preached ideas that were radical for his age: he denounced Hinduism's oppressive caste system and Islam's gender discrimination, preaching that all people can commune with the divine equally, without the intervention of rituals or priests. The Sikh faith is a monotheistic religion, meaning Sikhs worship one God. The three core pillars of Sikhism are: vaṇḍ chakkō (sharing with others, helping those in need, as well as participating as part of a community), kirat karō (earning/making a living honestly, without exploitation or fraud, and speaking the truth at all times) and naam japna (meditating on God’s name to live a life of decency and humility).
The temporary distractions of the material world are seen as an illusion. The qualities of ego, anger, greed, attachment and lust are known as the Five Thieves that rob a person of their ability to realize their oneness with God and creation. Sikhs work to counteract the temptations of these qualities through the values of service, equality, and seeking justice for all. Sikhs also believe that one’s form on Earth is only a temporary vessel for the eternal soul. Thus, the death of the physical body is a natural part of the life cycle, while the soul remains. Death is not an end, but merely the progression of the soul on its journey toward God.
Nine more gurus succeeded Guru Nanak (Angad, Amar Das, Ram Das, Arjan, Har Gobind, Har Rai, Har Krishan, Tegh Bahadur, and Gobind Singh), and continued to spread his teachings across the world.
The last guru, Guru Gobind Singh, named the Sikh sacred text, the Guru Granth Sahib, to be the eternal Guru that would guide the Sikhs going forward. It consists of 1,430 Anks, or pages, and 6,000 Sabads, or line compositions, all are written in poetic verse and are aligning to the rhythmic forms of ancient north Indian classical music. At the core of the Guru Granth Sahib is a yearning for a world governed by divine justice, without oppression of any kind.
The final living guru, Gobind Singh, also established the Khalsa, or order of Sikh soldier-saints. They are recognizable by "The 5 k's," their physical articles of faith: Kesh (unshorn hair and beard), Kirpan (ceremonial sword), Kangha (comb), Kara (steel bracelet) and Kachha (drawers). The Dastar, or turban, is considered a spiritual crown, a token of remembrance of the Sikh principles.
Subathu, Himachal Pradesh, India
East German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 111/73. Brigitte Bardot in Les pétroleuses / The Legend of Frenchie King (Christian-Jaque, Guy Casaril, 1971).
French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) died on 28 December 2025, at the age of 91. In the 1950s, she was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she established herself as an animal rights activist and made vegetarianism sexy. In the coming weeks, we will post a BB postcard every day to remember her as she once was.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father, and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying a modelling career and found herself in May 1949 on the cover of the French magazine Elle. Her incredible beauty was readily apparent, and Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand / Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953, she attended the Cannes Film Festival, where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956, she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as an ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. In 1953, she made her first US production, Un acte d'amour / Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smash success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. The immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the shooting of Et Dieu créa la femme / And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), directed by her husband, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at that time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped Brigitte Bardot's international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten', and fascination with her in America consisted of magazine photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theatres like lemmings. BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (Ralph Thomas, 1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne / La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957), which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur / Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "This Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defence attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre can shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous and deadly side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960, postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 195,7 and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre / Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career
Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée / Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle, has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at French Films: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the high point of her career when she agreed to make this film with high-profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess, and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot, and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names was based on an actual incident, and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterwards, Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire Playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men, including Samy Frey, her co-star in La Vérité / The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Jean-Luc Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris / Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) opposite Michel Piccoli. She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres / Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires /Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses / Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewellery and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990s, she was also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal was a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularising bikini swimwear, in such early films as Manina / Woman without a Veil (Willy Rozier, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (French Films), French Films, Wikipedia and IMDb.
And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
ugh the summer heat & humidity! it almost makes me wish it were cold again, but i complain about being too cold too though layers work in the cold. there’s only so much that can come off and still maintain decency. so another stuffy day last friday meant another loose tee with my gray skirt and i went with low heeled red velvet ankle wrap pumps. these are pretty cool and comfortable. they also do this mysterious thing where the laces somehow become extremely uneven by the time i take them off. it’s very odd.
Goddess Durga: the Female Form as the Supreme Being.
Durga’s themes are power over evil and negativity, knowledge and sustenance. Her symbols are fire, yellow-colored items, lions, rice bowls and spoons. The Hindu warrior Goddess Durga is typically depicted as a beautiful woman with ten arms that bear divine weapons to protect all that is sacred – including you. Her role in Indian mythology is so powerful that the national anthem sings Her praises as a guardian. According to the stories, Durga overpowered the great demon who threatened to destroy not only the earth but the gods themselves.
Durga’s festival (Durga puja or Durgotsava) comes during the early fall, when the skies are growing darker. As this happens, she offers to zealously defend goodness against any malevolence that dwells in those figurative shadows. If there is a special person or project that you want protected, pray for Durga’s aid today. Light a yellow candle (or any candle) and say:
‘Durga, protectress and guardian
Watch over (person, situation or project)
with all due diligence
Take the sword of truth
the power of justice
and the light of decency
to stand guard against any storms that come
So be it.’
Blow out the candle and relight it anytime you need safety.
Also pictured are 2 Dark Green Jade Chinese Dragon Cloak Hooks -formerly gilded with gold.
Queuing has often been seen as a special gift of the British - fair, functional and a bit dull. Learning the importance of waiting your turn is also an integral part of parental discipline and from a young age most of us are taught to queue for the same reason we are taught to share – it’s about respect, good manners and showing a level of growing maturity.Queuing skills are passed down from generation to generation – a baton of good manners that is inherent within us as a nation. It’s also not something we really ever question either, it’s simply accepted as a prerequisite in terms of social skills.
So what goes wrong on the A538 in the tunnels under Manchester Airport’s runways between Wilmslow and Junction 6 of the M56 motorway? Here, civilisation has broken down.
I’ll bet 99% or more of people driving through the tunnels at 8.30 on a Monday morning are regular commuters. They know the road opens into a dual carriageway with 50mph speed limit for the short distance under the two runways only for the two lanes to reconverge on the other side. So when the rush hour is at its peak, the traffic builds back into a longer and longer queue from where it meets the M56 junction up ahead. This quickly builds back to the tunnels and traffic coming from Wilmslow soon spots the bright glare of red brake lights burning ahead in the tunnels. In no time the queue forming in the left lane emerges into a line of stationary vehicles. It’s a queue. You have to be stupid not to recognise it as a queue.
Now, I wish to explain to drivers, such as the one in the white BMW D1 RHO, who has just passed a line of 400 yards of patient drivers that, along with all the others in the left lane, I am not some lower species of human because I am so stupid I haven’t realised there is a spare lane on the right (I’m not normally a slow driver either as I know what it was to drive a Ferrari 599 GTO and a Ford Focus rally car in the previous week too). And I’m not ‘hiding’ in the left lane because I want any excuse I can get to be late for work. In fact I want to get to work and I want to get there as quickly as possible; Probably just like Mr D1 RHO. Queuing is not my idea of fun and I would rather not be doing it.
But I do it out of respect to the others who in a civilised world consider it fair to let those who arrived first go first. We form queues in shops and any other place where numbers of people assemble to do the same thing at the same time. We could all choose to fight it out at the tunnel entrance, but who knows, Mr D1 RHO might lose out. Jump the queue and you can bet someone bigger than you might decide to remind you what respect is. Did you know that when they cone off one of the lanes for repairs that in fact the traffic flows through the tunnel quicker when there isn’t the stop start, push shove brawl as left laners don’t let rightlaners back in line, and then some rightlaner insists on driving parallel to the leftlaner all the way up the middle of the once-again two way road in some maniacal deathrace to get ahead of the other car? Hmmm?
So why do people think that when they are in their tin box the need for queuing is any different to lining up in a shop to get to the till? It isn’t. What happens in the tunnels under the runways at Manchester airport is that a queue forms in the left lane. The right lane is only used by queue jumpers who fully deserve the resentment and occasional road-rage they cause by ignoring all standards of politeness, decency, respect and civility.
We all want to get somewhere without delay or stress. You stressed out rightlaners, come join us on the left. You’ll find you’re with a much nicer class of human.
Dutch postcard by Takken, Utrecht, no. 3255.
French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) died on 28 December 2025, at the age of 91. In the 1950s, she was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she established herself as an animal rights activist and made vegetarianism sexy. In the coming weeks, we will post a BB postcard every day to remember her as she once was.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father, and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying a modelling career and found herself in May 1949 on the cover of the French magazine Elle. Her incredible beauty was readily apparent, and Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand / Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953, she attended the Cannes Film Festival, where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956, she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as an ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. In 1953, she made her first US production, Un acte d'amour / Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smash success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. The immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the shooting of Et Dieu créa la femme / And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), directed by her husband, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at that time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped Brigitte Bardot's international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten', and fascination with her in America consisted of magazine photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theatres like lemmings. BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (Ralph Thomas, 1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne / La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957), which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur / Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "This Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defence attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre can shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous and deadly side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960, postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 195,7 and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre / Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career
Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée / Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle, has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at French Films: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the high point of her career when she agreed to make this film with high-profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess, and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot, and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names was based on an actual incident, and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterwards, Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire Playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men, including Samy Frey, her co-star in La Vérité / The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Jean-Luc Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris / Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) opposite Michel Piccoli. She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres / Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires /Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses / Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewellery and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990s, she was also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal was a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularising bikini swimwear, in such early films as Manina / Woman without a Veil (Willy Rozier, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (French Films), French Films, Wikipedia and IMDb.
And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMDMZK_Notre_Dame_de_Lourdes_...
Grotte Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes; Vanier; Ottawa, Ontario.
Chambray shirt with watch worn over cuff à la Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli-style. Usually I wear this top with its sleeves rolled, but here I buttoned up & twirled my navy chiffon scarf into a pussycat bow, peeping with Chanel charms. Pleated skirt trimmed in lace I added myself because it was too short – now I twirl with perfect decency. I could walk for miles in these moccasins… Fashionshesays.com.
aka 'Unfair' Day
Today is one of the twice a year fair days we suffer here in Stow on the Wold. I say 'suffer' advisedly as this event used to be a good one. The gypsies, Travellers, Tinkers, Horse Traders, etc who come to town for these events, cause an awful lot of anxieties amongst the townsfolk, and most businesses close for the day - if not the week - as they lose, not only stock, but any hope of trade as well for the duration. Hotels and pubs use the time for refurbing the premises. Other business people take their annual holiday. The cause? Gangs of young people intent on finding a partner for life - scantily dressed, often very beautiful girls, wander the streets for the day, and are met by swarthy young men - sometimes they simply yell foul language at each other, other times they are to be found in the doorways and alleys (if they have a semblence of decency about them) in compromising clinches, and often shout abuse, spit at, and otherwise terrorise the peole who pay their taxes. It costs the town thousands of pounds to police the fair and to clean up afterwards, which is why the rates here are higher than most surrounding towns and villages. Police manage to impound many vehicles that are untaxed and uninsured, or are using red deisel(often stolen), and horses and carriages are driven at breakneck speeds up and down the narrow town streets, often the wrong way
I have lived here for over 30 years, and when I first arrived, the fair was a thing enjoyed by all - there were stalls, and fairground rides, and we were welcome to visit the horse sale and take photos. The old Romanies were friendly and controlled their childrens' behaviour, but over the years the whole thing has become a nightmare for the people who live and work here.
These snaps show the field where the fair is held before the event - in the state that it is in for most of the year. It is owned by one of the Gypsy families, but they have limited access, and they charge for entry to the field on fair day - but they do not contribute a fair amount to the cost to the town, except to the cleaning up of the field itself. Today the field will be covered with caravans, stalls and people, but I will not visit with my camera, as I should like to do, as I will feel intimidated and uncomfortable. Tomorrow, the field will be a sea of mud and litter. It will take a few days to clean up. The town itself will be left knee deep in litter by tonight, but it will be spotless by the morning.
West German collector card by Druckerei Hanns Uhrig, Frankfurt a. M. / NF Films. Photo: Pathé-Cinema. Brigitte Bardot and Louis Jourdan in La mariée est trop belle / The Bride Is Much Too Beautiful (Pierre Gaspard-Huit, 1956).
French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) died on 28 December 2025, at the age of 91. In the 1950s, she was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she became an animal rights activist. In the coming weeks, we will continue to post a BB postcard every day to remember her as she once was.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father, and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying to launch a modelling career and found herself on the cover of the French magazine Elle in May 1949. Her incredible beauty was readily apparent, and Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand / Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953, she attended the Cannes Film Festival, where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956, she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as an ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. In 1953, she made her first US production, Un acte d'amour / Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smash success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. The immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the filming of Et Dieu créa la femme / And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), directed by her husband, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at the time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped elevate Brigitte Bardot's international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten', and fascination with her in America consisted of magazine photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theatres like lemmings. BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (Ralph Thomas, 1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne / La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957), which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur / Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "This Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defence attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre can shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous and deadly side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960, postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957, and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre / Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career
Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée / Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle, has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at French Films: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the high point of her career when she agreed to make this film with high-profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess, and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot, and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names was based on an actual incident, and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterwards, Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire Playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men, including Samy Frey, her co-star in La Vérité / The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Jean-Luc Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris / Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) opposite Michel Piccoli. She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres / Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires /Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses / Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewellery and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990s, she was also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal was a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularising bikini swimwear, in such early films as Manina / Woman without a Veil (Willy Rozier, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (French Films), French Films, Wikipedia and IMDb.
And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
My heart goes out to the #law #enforcement of #dallas #Texas who have lost their brothers in the line of duty. I have sympathy for all of the friends and family of those who were targeted and assassinated by four BLM terrorists.
This flag represents the #courage #officers must find deep within themselves when facing insurmountable odds. The black background is a constant reminder of our fallen brothers and sisters. The blue line is what police officers protect, the barrier between anarchy and a civilized society, between order and chaos, between respect for decency and lawlessness. Together they symbolize the camaraderie law enforcement officers all share, a brotherhood like none other.
BLM is a racist hate group. If you can't see that, you are part of the problem. Yes, black lives matter.. but more importantly, ALL lives matter.
11th Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Rovaniemi.
Finland hosts the 11th Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting on 7 May in Rovaniemi. Minister-level representatives from the eight Arctic States will convene to review and approve work completed under the two-year Finnish Chairmanship to improve sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic.
Ministry for Foreign Affairs provides photo material for media representatives, participants and organisers of the meeting. Please feel free to use the photos, considering the following restrictions: Not for commercial purposes nor reselling. When publishing the pictures, the name of the photographer and organization shall be mentioned as the source. No picture manipulation is permitted. The holder of the picture rights and/or the organisation shall at all times retain the copyright to the picture. When publishing the pictures, the publisher shall ensure the legality of the context where the pictures are used, obtain the permissions and consents required for their publication, and observe the generally established practices and decency. The publisher shall ensure that publication of the pictures does not insult anyone’s privacy or dignity.
Photo: Jouni Porsanger / Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland
11th Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Rovaniemi. On the front line from left to right: Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway Ine Marie Eriksen Søreide, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Sweden Margot Wallström, Secretary of State of United States of America Michael Pompeo, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Finland Timo Soini, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kingdom of Denmark Anders Samuelsen, Minister for Foreign Affairs and External Trade of Iceland Guðlaugur Þór Þórðarson and Permanent Secretary of Ministry of the Environment of Finland Hannele Pokka.
Finland hosts the 11th Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting on 7 May in Rovaniemi. Minister-level representatives from the eight Arctic States will convene to review and approve work completed under the two-year Finnish Chairmanship to improve sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic.
Ministry for Foreign Affairs provides photo material for media representatives, participants and organisers of the meeting. Please feel free to use the photos, considering the following restrictions: Not for commercial purposes nor reselling. When publishing the pictures, the name of the photographer and organization shall be mentioned as the source. No picture manipulation is permitted. The holder of the picture rights and/or the organisation shall at all times retain the copyright to the picture. When publishing the pictures, the publisher shall ensure the legality of the context where the pictures are used, obtain the permissions and consents required for their publication, and observe the generally established practices and decency. The publisher shall ensure that publication of the pictures does not insult anyone’s privacy or dignity.
Photo: Jouni Porsanger / Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland
Dutch postcard by Uitg. Takken, Utrecht, no. AX 4322. Photo: N.V. City Film, Den Haag / Francofilm. Brigitte Bardot in Voulez-vous danser avec moi / Come Dance With Me! (Michel Boisrond, 1959).
French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) died on 28 December 2025, at the age of 91. In the 1950s, she was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she became an animal rights activist. In the coming weeks, we will continue to post a BB postcard every day to remember her as she once was.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father, and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying to launch a modelling career and found herself on the cover of the French magazine Elle in May 1949. Her incredible beauty was readily apparent, and Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand / Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953, she attended the Cannes Film Festival, where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956, she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as an ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. In 1953, she made her first US production, Un acte d'amour / Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smash success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. The immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the filming of Et Dieu créa la femme / And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), directed by her husband, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at the time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped elevate Brigitte Bardot's international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten', and fascination with her in America consisted of magazine photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theatres like lemmings. BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (Ralph Thomas, 1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne / La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957), which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur / Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "This Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defence attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre can shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous and deadly side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960, postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957, and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre / Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career
Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée / Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle, has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at French Films: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the high point of her career when she agreed to make this film with high-profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess, and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot, and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names was based on an actual incident, and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterwards, Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire Playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men, including Samy Frey, her co-star in La Vérité / The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Jean-Luc Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris / Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) opposite Michel Piccoli. She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres / Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires /Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses / Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewellery and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990s, she was also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal was a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularising bikini swimwear, in such early films as Manina / Woman without a Veil (Willy Rozier, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (French Films), French Films, Wikipedia and IMDb.
And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Top Motivational Movies Every Entrepreneur MUST Watch For A Dose Of Inspiration 1. Nightcrawler (2014) NightCrawlers I just finished watching this movie, and the first thing I did after watching it was start writing this post. Nightcrawler is a movie for people with great vision. This movie is little brutal, but Jake Gyllenhaal’s acting will keep you engaged. It’s about a struggling guy who is looking for a job but can’t find one. Instead, he finds a window of opportunity after witnessing a crime and decides to become a crime journalist. This movie will teach you that with a little persuasion and drive, anyone can become anything. It will teach you how focusing on, and improving, your positive attributes will make you limitless. Go watch this movie, and then come back and tell me you aren’t inspired. It’s not possible. And without giving away any spoilers, here’s the last line of the movie: “I will never ask you to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself.” 2. The Social Network (2010) The Social Network was a Hollywood blockbuster. It was based on the fairy-tale rise of Mark Zuckerberg and his startup – Facebook. The Social Network remains a top choice for inspiration because of its deft storytelling and brilliant background score. This is a good movie on learning how to take your dreams and turn them into reality. The movie also teaches us a lot on how to scale a company from a dorm room to the most successful social media platform the world has ever seen! Although the accuracy of this movie has been questioned, it doesn’t matter, it is a great source of inspiration for all entrepreneurs. Here is one of the best lines from the movie: “The internet’s not written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink.” 3. Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) Pirates of Silicon Valley is another well-crafted movie covering the successes of Bill Gates’s Microsoft and Steve Jobs’s Apple. Both were no doubt “great pirates” and this movie does a great job of detailing that. The movie is a take on the rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates from the very early days. Noah Wyle did a great job of portraying young Steve Jobs in this made-for-television movie. And Anthony Michale Hall does a great Bill Gates. Here’s one of his quotes: “Success is a menace. It fools smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” 4. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) Yes, it’s spelled like that. This is one of my favorite motivational movies, and one of the best movies ever on never giving up. Will Smith’s amazing portrayal of Chris Gardner will give you goosebumps. This is a movie based on Chris’s memoirs. It was a best-selling book and then became a blockbuster movie. It adds in a gripping sense of reality that you don’t find in a lot of cheesy Hollywood movies. The movie features a powerful, yet simple message: Never give up. Here’s a great line: “The world is your oyster. It’s up to you to find the pearls." 5. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) How could we leave out this one!? It’s one of IMDB’s all-time top 10 movies. Here’s the story: Two imprisoned men bond over a period of many years, finding solace and eventual redemption through acts of common decency. The protagonist Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) manages to make the best out of a very bad situation (being imprisoned for a false murder). Through perseverance, he manages to achieve more than he ever thought possible. Morgan Freeman plays the other main character, and their chemistry is unmatchable. During one of their earliest conversations, Andy says: “I guess it comes down a simple choice: Get busy living, or get busy dying." 6. Forrest Gump (1994) This is a beautiful story about a simple man with good intentions, who accidentally becomes a phenomenal success just by living his the life he feels is right. He wins medals, becomes a professional ping-pong player, takes up running, owns a huge shrimping company, and inspires people all across the country. The story revolves around the simple nature of Forrest (Tom Hanks) and how he proves that you don’t have to be a genius to achieve something. All you have to do is try. My favorite quote from the movie: “I’m not a smart man. But I *know* what love is." 7. Moneyball (2011) This movie is about the Oakland Athletics and its general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt). The team is an underdog and is losing a lot of money. All of their star players have been picked up by bigger teams. Now, Billy needs to look at how to create a winning team without the kind of talent that money can buy. This movie shows how entrepreneurs can take an innovative approach to an existing way of doing business, and beat out the competition with little to no money. Here’s a great line: “When your enemy’s making mistakes, don’t interrupt him.” 8. The Godfather (1972) The Godfather is another one of IMDB’s all-time top 10 movies, and it’s also one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time. This is a story about the growth of a small family business and the fighting off of the opposition. The business changes through time until it finally becomes the largest organized crime syndicate in New York City. The father and son who run the operation show what it takes to get to the top and stay there. It’s a great watch for those who want to learn how to stay on the top. Note: Don’t do anything illegal, just find some inspiration in these shrewd business operators. And I know you won’t be able to resist from tweeting this line: “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” 9. Wall Street (1987) This a movie about business and greed. The story is about an ambitious young stockbroker, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen). He has and does everything in his power to succeed, even if that means a little insider trading. Insider trading is a highly reprehensible and punishable crime, and yet, he has no fear. He meets with Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas) and starts doing business with the motto “greed is good”. You don’t have to succumb to greed to draw inspiration from this movie. Here’s a great line: “The most valuable commodity I know of is information." 10. Rocky (1976) This is the classic underdog story. Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) is given the chance to fight the heavyweight champ. He has an opportunity to make a better life for himself by going head to head with the challenge. This movie teaches a lot about the competitive spirit, and will inspire you to get up and beat your competition (hopefully not literally!). Always remember this truth: “Every champion was once a contender who refused to give up.” 11. Jerry McGuire (1996) This is a classic movie (based on a true story) that shows just what it takes to stay at the top. The protagonist (Tom Cruise) is faced with rejection and people keep turning their backs on him while he takes big leaps of faith. Slowly, he identifies the best road for him to follow, and ultimately ends up being successful in both business and life. Here’s a little-known quote from this movie (written on a sign in a locker room): “Success consists of simply getting up one more time than you fall.” 12. Startup.com (2001) Startup.com is an excellent documentary about the internet gold rush of the late 1990’s. This documentary has all the necessary ingredients to learn a few great lessons about the internet bubble. A rise in competition, lifelong friendships on the line, and do-or-die ambitions all combine to form a deadly cocktail for an internet startup. Here’s a warning sign that things aren’t going great: “It’s about the money. Don’t BS me. It’s obviously about the money." 13. Something Ventured (2011) If you happen to be an entrepreneur looking forward to exploring the VC avenue, this documentary has some great insight. Something Ventured is a documentary based on the perspective of the first venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. It’s a really great way of looking at how things get funded, and what’s on the line for big time investors. It’s also a great look at how to be brave and push through innovative ideas in a market that always likes to be complacent. For any entrepreneur or investor: “The risks were just enormous." 14. Boiler Room (2000) Although this movie is most likely inspired by the original Wall Street, there are few great salesman tips to inspire you here! Let this movie guide you to find that inner business spirit. It’s a total must-watch to get you motivated. Also, it’ll help you stay true to your spirit and not become morally corrupt. One great line to remember: “I had a very strong work ethic. The problem was my ethics in work.” Click To Tweet 15. Office Space (1999) Raise your hand if you hate work! If you’ve ever hated an office job, Office Space is definitely a movie for you. This movie will help inspire you to get out of that awful 9 to 5 lifestyle. This is such a motivating movie… It’s about a guy who just can’t stand going to work anymore. Instead of being fired, he gets promoted, but his bitterness about his job comes back to cause him trouble. Seriously amazing movie. Here’s a great line: “The thing is, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care." Bonus : Ctrl+Alt+Compete (2011) Ctrl+Alt+Compete is a documentary movie with some of the most up-to-date insights into the modern startup industry. Here you can take a look into the highs, the lows, and the harsh realities of the startup world. This movie is a reality check on the illusions of the startup industry in general. Here’s a line about investing: “This is really just legitimized gambling.” Movies for Motivation : Apart from these movies, any of the TED videos are highly recommended, and will give you much that needed push to start and finish up anything. Another movie that I highly recommend you check out is “The Secret”. This movie will not only help you build a positive outlook, it will change your perspective and will help you live a meaningful and happy life. This is my list of inspirational movies, and I’m sure there are many more movies which have motivated you. Share those movies with me in the comments. What do you watch when you need that extra inspirational kick? Like this post? Share it with your friends!,https://www.facebook.com/thefreestudy/photos/a.219887535101731.1073741828.183195608770924/407141199709696/?type=3
Two imprisoned men bond over a number of years, finding solace and eventual redemption through acts of common decency.
This year's show brought students from both Lloydminster & Vermilion campuses together to show off their style, budgeting and presentation skills. Students had a $33.33 budget each to go out into the community and purchase an outfit and appropriate accessories for a Business Awards Banquet.
They were expected to practice their budgeting skills as they shopped for their outfits. Contestants had to show a good taste in fashion and decency. Finally, contestants were tested on their presentation and interpersonal skills as they walked up and down the runway and answered questions from our ‘celebrity’ judges.
The main idea here is to challenge the notion that students have to spend a lot of money to look good for work. Most students struggle with money and this show is a fun way of capturing budgeting, fashion and presentation skills.
"The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people."
"The cause of war is preparation for war."
"The Negro slave trade was the first step in modern world commerce, followed by the modern theory of colonial expansion. Slaves as an article of commerce were shipped as long as the traffic paid."
"The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree."
"Human nature is not simple and any classification that roughly divides men into good and bad, superior and inferior, slave and free, is and must be ludicrously untrue and universally dangerous as a permanent exhaustive classification."
"I believe in God who made of one blood all races that dwell on earth. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through Time and Opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibility of infinite development."
"Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked — who is good? not that men are ignorant, — what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men."
"The Soviet Union does not allow any church of any kind to interfere with education, and religion is not taught in public schools. It seems to me that this is the greatest gift of the Russian Revolution to the modern world. Most educated modern men no longer believe in religious dogma. If questioned they will usually resort to double-talk before admitting the fact. But who today actually believes that this world is ruled and directed by a benevolent person of great power who, on humble appeal, will change the course of events at our request? Who believes in miracles? Many folk follow religious ceremonies and services and allow their children to learn fairy tales and so-called religious truth, which in time the children come to recognize as conventional lies told by their parents and teachers for the children's good. One can hardly exaggerate the moral disaster of the custom. We have to thank the Soviet Union for the courage to stop it."
"I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:
"But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!
Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionately to believe such an extraordinary dictum as this? That nations are coming to believe it is manifest daily. Wave on wave, each with increasing virulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time. Its first effects are funny: the strut of the Southerner, the arrogance of the Englishman amuck, the whoop of the hoodlum who vicariously leads your mob."
"How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily."
Quote Source -> secure.wikimedia.org/wikiquote/en/wiki/W.E.B._Du_Bois
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Flessenpost verzonden door Christine Puhane en Hendrik uit Duitsland, afgelopen zondag op de zuidkant van de Vliehors gevonden.
Zij kiezen hun vakantiebestemming aan de hand van waar hun flessenpost wordt gevonden.
Ze hebben geluk, de fles is gevonden op Vlieland, een prima vakantiebestemming.
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Message in a bottle, posted by Christine Puhane from Cöln in Germany and her friend Hendrik.
I did wrote Christine Puhane an email to inform her the message in a bottle had been found.
Sadly Christine Puhane did not have the decency to reply to my message, so I do not know where and when her bottle was thrown into the sea.
…Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us…
There are some who will have strong feelings about today.
I have taken my lesson from The Complete Middle Eastern Cookbook. This is described as Lahuh, a Yemeni bread made from nothing more than wholemeal wheat flour, salt and water. My informant notes it is favoured during Ramadan and other Muslim feasts. She describes how the batter is allowed to ferment, like sourdough. Unlike the Yemeni sponge bread, this version is cooked on both sides. There's a sourdough culture of extended lineage in our family — though it is reasoned like our own microbiomes they evolve and change to resemble their environment. When I mixed my batter, I inoculated it with this culture.
Variations on the name Lahuh and batter breads like this feature in the cuisines of NE Africa and the Arabian Peninsula — I'm sure you're familiar with injera. But the references published on the internet seem to predominantly come from one place which has appropriated this bread as their own, as they have Shakshouka and Hummus bi tahini.
Of course, you already know the Middle East is complicated and ownership of many things is claimed and contested.
Today, like all days, we should break bread together. The cruel denial of access to food — to bread, the staff of life — in acts of conflict is inhumane and cannot be justified, whatever the grievance. This bread was good, was good to share. My counsel to anyone prepared to appropriate, as your own, the food of others is to at least have the human decency to sit down with them and share your spoils. Unless, of course, your eternal objective is to perpetuate grievance.
Dutch postcard by Uitg. Takken, Utrecht, no. AX 5022. Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Brigitte Bardot in Vie privée / Private Life (Louis Malle, 1962).
French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) died on 28 December 2025, at the age of 91. In the 1950s, she was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she became an animal rights activist. In the coming weeks, we will continue to post a BB postcard every day to remember her as she once was.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father, and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying to launch a modelling career and found herself on the cover of the French magazine Elle in May 1949. Her incredible beauty was readily apparent, and Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand / Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953, she attended the Cannes Film Festival, where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956, she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as an ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. In 1953, she made her first US production, Un acte d'amour / Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smash success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. The immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the filming of Et Dieu créa la femme / And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), directed by her husband, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at the time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped elevate Brigitte Bardot's international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten', and fascination with her in America consisted of magazine photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theatres like lemmings. BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (Ralph Thomas, 1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne / La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957), which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur / Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "This Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defence attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre can shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous and deadly side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960, postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957, and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre / Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career
Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée / Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle, has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at French Films: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the high point of her career when she agreed to make this film with high-profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess, and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot, and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names was based on an actual incident, and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterwards, Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire Playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men, including Samy Frey, her co-star in La Vérité / The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Jean-Luc Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris / Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) opposite Michel Piccoli. She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres / Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires /Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses / Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewellery and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990s, she was also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal was a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularising bikini swimwear, in such early films as Manina / Woman without a Veil (Willy Rozier, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (French Films), French Films, Wikipedia and IMDb.
And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
The Postcard
A postcard bearing no publisher's name that was posted in Croydon on Monday the 29th. July 1918 to:
Miss Gourlay,
59, Langney Road,
Eastbourne.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"Dear Nellie,
Thank you for your card,
I now expect you will be
quite happy.
I will write you a letter
tomorrow when I get
some paper.
I gave Freddie your
message, I expect you
will have received Mabel's
letter by now.
Everything is alright here.
With best love,
Mother".
Thornton Heath Pond
The old pond at Thornton Heath is in the middle of the London to Brighton road between Croydon and Streatham. The pond appears on all the earliest maps of Croydon, and was an important public watering place for horses and cattle moving to and from Croydon.
It is possible that the charcoal burners who operated in the area from at least the 16th. century and probably much earlier used the pond as their source of water - hence the name Colliers Water Lane nearby.
However by the late 19th. century, with increasingly heavy traffic, the pond became a potential hazard. In 1891 for example, a parcel mail coach on its way from Brighton to London in fog ended up in the pond.
In 1897 the pond was surrounded by railings, and a new fountain was erected in the middle to commemorate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. It is clearly visible in the photograph.
In 1953 the pond was filled in and turned into an ornamental garden with a small pool. (I wonder what happened to the fountain???)
Spasmodic vandalism led the council to fill in even this small pool in 1975, and Thornton Heath Pond became little more than a busy traffic roundabout on the A23.
Nevertheless, there are regular calls to get the pond reinstated in some way, and it may be back one day.
One feature which will not be back is the Gallows which stood close by, and which was used in order to hang numerous convicted highwaymen.
The Wheatsheaf
The pub on the left of the photograph, The Wheatsheaf, is currently (June 2020) being torn down.
The Wheatsheaf was situated at 757-759 London Road, and was one of three Thornton Heath Pond pubs, all of which are now gone. The Wheatsheaf dates back to the 1800's and was originally built as a coaching inn. The name reflects the area's rural past.
The Wheatsheaf had a reputation for being haunted, including the ghost of the daughter of a former landlord. Local legend states that bodies were stored in the cellar of the pub after being hanged in public at the nearby gallows.
R.J. Reynolds
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, the 29th. July 1918 was not a good day for the American business leader R. J. Reynolds, because he died on that day. Reynolds, who was born in 1850, was founder of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.
George Fell
The 29th. July 1918 was also not a good day for George Fell, because he died on that day. George, who was born in 1849, was an American surgeon and inventor.
He was the designer of the first artificial ventilator, and the first electric chair that provided a novel method of execution.
When used, the condemned person is strapped to a specially-built wooden chair and electrocuted through electrodes fastened on the head and leg. This execution method, conceived in 1881 by a Buffalo, New York dentist named Alfred P. Southwick, was developed throughout the 1880's as a supposed humane alternative to hanging, and first used in 1890. While death was originally theorized to result from damage to the brain, it was shown in 1899 that it primarily results from ventricular fibrillation and eventual cardiac arrest.
Although the electric chair has long been a symbol of the death penalty in the United States, its use is in decline due to the rise of lethal injection, which is widely believed to be a more humane method of execution. While some states still maintain electrocution as a legal method of execution, today it is only maintained as a secondary method that may be chosen over lethal injection at the request of the prisoner, except in Tennessee and South Carolina, where it may be used without input from the prisoner if the drugs for lethal injection are not available.
As of 2021, electrocution is an optional form of execution in the states of Alabama and Florida, both of which allow the prisoner to choose lethal injection as an alternative method. In the state of Kentucky, the electric chair has been retired, except for those who were sentenced to death for an offense committed prior to March 31, 1998, and who choose electrocution; inmates who do not choose electrocution and inmates sentenced to death for crimes committed after that date are executed by lethal injection.
On the 8th. February 2008, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that execution by electric chair was a "cruel and unusual punishment" under the state's constitution. This brought executions by this method to an end in Nebraska, which had been the last remaining state to retain electrocution as its sole method of execution.
Invention of the Electric Chair
In the late 1870's to early 1880's, the spread of arc lighting, a type of outdoor street lighting that required high voltages in the range of 3,000–6,000 volts, was followed by one story after another in newspapers about how the high voltages used were killing people, usually unwary linemen.
It was a strange new phenomenon that seemed to instantaneously strike a victim dead without leaving a mark. One of these accidents, in Buffalo, New York, on the 7th. August 1881, led to the inception of the electric chair.
That evening a drunken dock worker named George Lemuel Smith, looking for the thrill of a tingling sensation he had noticed when grabbing the guard rail in a Brush Electric Company arc lighting power house, managed to sneak his way back into the plant at night and grabbed the brush and ground of a large electric dynamo. He died instantly.
The coroner who investigated the case brought it up that year at a local Buffalo scientific society. Another member attending that lecture, Alfred P. Southwick, a dentist who had a technical background, thought some application could be found for the curious phenomenon.
Southwick joined physician George E. Fell and the head of the Buffalo ASPCA in a series of experiments electrocuting hundreds of stray dogs. They ran trials with the dog in water and out of water, and varied the electrode type and placement until they came up with a repeatable method to euthanize animals using electricity.
Southwick went on in the early 1880's to advocate that this method be used as a more humane replacement for hanging in capital cases, coming to national attention when he published his ideas in scientific journals in 1882 and 1883.
He worked out calculations based on the dog experiments, trying to develop a scaled-up method that would work on humans. Early on in his designs he adopted a modified version of the dental chair as a way to restrain the condemned, a device that from then on would be called the electric chair, although it also acquired various nicknames including:
-- Gruesome Gertie
-- Old Smokey
-- Old Sparky
-- Yellow Mama.
The Gerry Commission
After a series of botched hangings in the United States, there was mounting criticism of that form of capital punishment and of the death penalty in general.
In 1886, newly-elected New York State governor David B. Hill set up a three-member death penalty commission, which was chaired by the human rights advocate Elbridge Thomas Gerry, and included Southwick, to investigate a more humane means of execution.
The commission surveyed the history of execution, and sent out a fact-finding questionnaire to government officials, lawyers, and medical experts all around the state asking for their opinion.
A slight majority of respondents recommended hanging over electrocution, with a few instead recommending the abolition of capital punishment. The commission also contacted electrical experts, including Thomson-Houston Electric Company's Elihu Thomson (who recommended high voltage AC connected to the head and the spine) and the inventor Thomas Edison (who also recommended AC, as well as using a Westinghouse generator).
They also attended electrocutions of dogs by George Fell who had worked with Southwick in the early 1880's experiments. Fell was conducting further experiments, electrocuting anesthetized vivisected dogs trying to discern exactly how electricity killed a subject.
In 1888, the Commission recommended electrocution using Southwick's electric chair idea with metal conductors attached to the condemned person's head and feet. They further recommended that executions be handled by the state instead of the individual counties, with three electric chairs set up at Auburn, Clinton, and Sing Sing prisons.
A bill following these recommendations passed the legislature and was signed by Governor Hill on the 4th. June 1888, set to go into effect on the 1st. January 1889.
The New York Medico-Legal Commission
The bill itself contained no details on the type or amount of electricity that should be used, and the New York Medico-Legal Society, an informal society composed of doctors and lawyers, was given the task of determining these factors.
In September 1888, a committee was formed and recommended 3000 volts, although the type of electricity, direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC), was not determined, and since tests up to that point had been done on animals smaller than a human (dogs), some members were unsure that the lethal nature of AC had been conclusively proven.
At this point the state's efforts to design the electric chair became intermixed with what has come to be known as the war of the currents, a competition between Thomas Edison's direct current power system and George Westinghouse's alternating current based system. The two companies had been competing commercially since 1886, and a series of events had turned it into an all-out media war in 1888.
The committee head, neurologist Frederick Peterson, enlisted the services of Harold P. Brown as a consultant. Brown had been on his own crusade against alternating current after the shoddy installation of pole-mounted AC arc lighting lines in New York City had caused several deaths in early 1888.
Peterson had been an assistant at Brown's July 1888 public electrocution of dogs with AC at Columbia College, an attempt by Brown to prove AC was more deadly than DC. Technical assistance in these demonstrations was provided by Thomas Edison's West Orange laboratory, and there grew to be some form of collusion between Edison Electric and Brown.
Back at West Orange on the 5th. December 1888, Brown set up an experiment with members of the press, members of the Medico-Legal Society including Elbridge Gerry who was also chairman of the death penalty commission, and Thomas Edison looking on.
Brown used alternating current for all of his tests on animals larger than a human, including 4 calves and a lame horse, all dispatched with 750 volts of AC. Based on these results the Medico-Legal Society recommended the use of 1000–1500 volts of alternating current for executions, and newspapers noted the AC used was half the voltage used in the power lines over the streets of American cities.
Westinghouse criticized these tests as a skewed self-serving demonstration designed to be a direct attack on alternating current, and accused Brown of being in the employ of Edison.
At the request of death penalty commission chairman Gerry, Medico-Legal Society members; electrotherapy expert Alphonse David Rockwell, and Columbia College professor Louis H. Laudy, were given the task of working out the details of electrode placement.
They again turned to Brown to supply the technical assistance. Brown asked Edison Electric Light to supply equipment for the tests, and treasurer Francis S. Hastings (who seemed to be one of the primary movers at the company trying to portray Westinghouse as a peddler of death-dealing AC current) tried to obtain a Westinghouse AC generator for the test but found none could be acquired.
They ended up using Edison's West Orange laboratory for the animal tests that they conducted in mid-March 1889. Superintendent of Prisons Austin E. Lathrop asked Brown to design the chair, but Brown turned down the offer.
George Fell drew up the final designs for a simple oak chair and went against the Medico-Legal Society recommendations, changing the position of the electrodes to the head and the middle of the back.
Brown took on the job of finding the generators needed to power the chair. He managed to surreptitiously acquire three Westinghouse AC generators that were being decommissioned with the help of Edison and Westinghouse's chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, a move that made sure that Westinghouse's equipment would be associated with the first execution.
The electric chair was built by Edwin F. Davis, the first "state electrician" (executioner) for the State of New York.
The First Electric Chair Execution
The first person in line to die under New York's new electrocution law was Joseph Chapleau, convicted for beating his neighbor to death with a stake, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
The next person scheduled to be executed was William Kemmler, convicted of murdering his wife with a hatchet. An appeal on Kemmler's behalf was made to the New York Court of Appeals on the grounds that the use of electricity as a means of execution constituted a "cruel and unusual punishment," and was thus contrary to the constitution of the United States and the state of New York.
On the 30th. December 1889, the writ of habeas corpus sworn out on Kemmler's behalf was denied by the court, with Judge Dwight writing in a lengthy ruling:
"We have no doubt that if the Legislature of this
State should undertake to proscribe for any
offense against its laws the punishment
of burning at the stake, breaking at the wheel,
etc., it would be the duty of the courts to
pronounce upon such attempt the
condemnation of the Constitution.
The question now to be answered is whether
the legislative act here assailed is subject to
the same condemnation. Certainly, it is not so
on its face, for, although the mode of death
described is conceded to be unusual, there is
no common knowledge or consent that it is
cruel; it is a question of fact whether an electric
current of sufficient intensity and skillfully
applied will produce death without unnecessary
suffering."
Kemmler was executed in New York's Auburn Prison on the 6th. August 1890; the "state electrician" was Edwin Davis. The first 17-second passage of 1,000 volts AC through Kemmler caused unconsciousness, but failed to stop his heart and breathing.
The attending physicians, Edward Charles Spitzka and Carlos Frederick MacDonald, came forward to examine Kemmler. After confirming Kemmler was still alive, Spitzka reportedly called out:
"Have the current turned
on again, quick, no delay."
However the generator needed time to re-charge. In the second attempt, Kemmler received a 2,000 volt AC shock. Blood vessels under the skin ruptured and bled, and the areas around the electrodes singed; some witnesses reported that his body caught fire.
The entire execution took about eight minutes. George Westinghouse later commented that:
"They would have done
better using an axe."
The New York Times ran the headline:
"Far worse than hanging".
Adoption of the Electric Chair
The electric chair was adopted by Ohio (1897), Massachusetts (1900), New Jersey (1906) and Virginia (1908), and soon became the prevalent method of execution in the United States, replacing hanging. The electric chair remained the most prominent execution method until the mid-1980's when lethal injection became widely accepted for conducting judicial executions.
The Philippines also adopted the electric chair from 1926 to 1987. A well-publicized triple execution took place there in May 1972, when Jaime Jose, Basilio Pineda and Edgardo Aquino were electrocuted for the 1967 abduction and gang-rape of the young actress Maggie de la Riva. The last electric chair execution in the Philippines was in 1976 and was later replaced with lethal injection.
Ethiopia had, according to some sources, attempted to adopt the electric chair as a method of executing criminals. The emperor Menelik II is said to have acquired three electric chairs in 1896 at the behest of a missionary, but could not make the devices work, as his nation did not have a reliable source of electric power at that time. Two of the chairs were either used as garden furniture or given to friends, and Menelik II is said to have used the third electric chair as a throne. How's that for re-purposing!
Key Events in the United States
Serial killer Lizzie Halliday was the first woman sentenced to die in the electric chair, in 1894, but governor Roswell P. Flower commuted her sentence to life in a mental institution after a medical commission declared her to be insane.
Martha M. Place became the first woman to be executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on the 20th. March 1899, for the murder of her 17-year-old stepdaughter, Ida Place.
Leon Czolgosz was executed in the electric chair at New York's Auburn Prison on the 29th. October 1901, for the assassination of then-President William McKinley.
The first photograph of an execution by electric chair was of housewife Ruth Snyder at Sing Sing on the evening of the 12th. January 1928, for the murder of her husband.
The photograph was a front-page story in the New York Daily News the following morning by news photographer Tom Howard. He had smuggled a camera into the death chamber and photographed Ruth in the electric chair as the current was turned on. It remains one of the best-known examples of photojournalism, and is easily accessible on the Internet.
A record was set on the 13th. July 1928, when seven men were executed consecutively in the electric chair at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville, Kentucky.
On the 16th. June 1944, an African-American teenager, 14-year-old George Stinney, became the youngest person ever executed in the electric chair when he was electrocuted at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina.
Stinney's conviction was subsequently overturned in 2014 after a circuit court judge vacated his sentence on the grounds that Stinney did not receive a fair trial. The judge determined that Stinney's legal counsel was inadequate, thus violating his rights under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The last person to be executed by electric chair without the choice of an alternative method was Lynda Lyon Block on the 10th. May 2002, in Alabama.
Process and Mechanism
The condemned inmate's head and legs are shaved on the day of the execution. After the condemned inmate is escorted to and seated in the chair, their arms and legs are tightly strapped with leather belts to restrict movement or resistance.
A cap with a saltwater-soaked sponge is affixed to the inmate's head, and electrodes are attached to the inmate's shaved legs. The inmate is typically hooded or blindfolded.
After the inmate is read the order of execution and permitted to make a final statement, the execution commences.
Various cycles (changes in voltage and duration) of alternating current are passed through the individual's body in order to cause lethal damage to the internal organs. The first, more powerful jolt (between 2,000 and 2,500 volts) of electric current is intended to cause immediate unconsciousness, ventricular fibrillation, and eventual cardiac arrest.
The second, less powerful jolt (500–1,500 volts) is intended to cause lethal damage to the vital organs.
In 1999, Allen Lee Davis was the last person executed in Florida's electric chair. Up to 10 Amperes of electric current were applied for 38 seconds.
After the cycles are completed, a doctor checks the inmate for any signs of life. If none are present, the doctor reports and records the time of death, and prison officials wait for the body to cool down before removing it for autopsy.
If the inmate still exhibits signs of life, the doctor notifies the warden, who usually will order another round of electric current or (rarely) postpone the execution such as with Willie Francis.
Controversies and Criticisms
(a) Possibility of Consciousness and Pain During Execution
Critics of the electric chair dispute whether the first jolt of electricity reliably induces immediate unconsciousness as proponents often claim. Witness testimony, botched electrocutions, and post-mortem examinations suggest that execution by electric chair is often painful.
(b) Botched executions
The electric chair has been criticized because of several instances in which the subjects were killed only after being subjected to multiple electric shocks. This led to a call for ending of the practice, as being a "cruel and unusual punishment".
Trying to address such concerns, Nebraska introduced a new electrocution protocol in 2004, which called for the administration of a 15-second application of current at 2,450 volts; after a 15-minute wait, an official then checks for signs of life.
In April 2007, new concerns raised regarding the 2004 protocol resulted in the ushering in of a different Nebraska protocol, calling for a 20-second application of current at 2,450 volts.
In 1946, the electric chair failed to kill Willie Francis, who reportedly shrieked, "Take it off! Let me breathe!", after the current was applied.
It turned out that the portable electric chair had been improperly set up by an intoxicated prison guard and inmate. A case was brought before the U.S. Supreme Court, with lawyers for the condemned arguing that although Francis did not die, he had, in fact, been executed.
The argument was rejected on the basis that re-execution did not violate the double jeopardy clause of the 5th. Amendment of the United States Constitution, and Francis was returned to the electric chair and executed in 1947.
Florida saw three highly controversial botched electrocutions in the 1990's, starting with the 1990 execution of Jesse Tafero. His case generated significant controversy, because with the first administration of electricity, Tafero's face and head caught on fire.
Tafero's execution ultimately required three shocks over the course of seven minutes. The error was blamed on prison officials replacing Florida's old natural sea sponge with a kitchen sponge.
The 1997 execution of Pedro Medina in Florida created controversy when flames burst from his head. An autopsy found that Medina had died instantly when the first surge of electricity had destroyed his brain and brain stem.
A judge ruled that the incident arose from "unintentional human error" rather than any faults in the apparatus, equipment, and electrical circuitry of Florida's electric chair.
In Florida, on the 8th. July 1999, Allen Lee Davis, convicted of murder, was executed in the Florida electric chair "Old Sparky". Davis' face was bloodied, and photographs were taken, which were later posted on the Internet.
An investigation concluded that Davis had begun bleeding before the electricity was applied, and that the chair had functioned as intended. Florida's Supreme Court ruled that the electric chair did not constitute "cruel and unusual punishment".
Decline and Current Status of the Electric Chair
The use of the electric chair has declined since the 1979 advent of lethal injection, which is now the default method in all U.S. jurisdictions that authorize capital punishment.
As of 2023, the only places that still reserve the electric chair as an option for execution are the U.S. states of Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
Arkansas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma laws provide for its use should lethal injection ever be held to be unconstitutional.
Inmates in the other states must select either it or lethal injection. In Kentucky, only inmates sentenced before a certain date can choose to be executed by electric chair.
Use of the electric chair in the United States gradually declined in the 1990's due to the widespread adoption of lethal injection. A number of states still allow the condemned person to choose between electrocution and lethal injection, with the most recent U.S. electrocution, of Nicholas Todd Sutton, taking place in February 2020 in Tennessee.
In 2021, South Carolina's governor Henry McMaster passed a law forcing inmates to be executed by electrocution if lethal injection were not available. The law also mandated electrocution in the event that an inmate refused to select their execution method, between South Carolina's options of lethal injection, the electric chair, and a firing squad.
In 2022, a judge in South Carolina declared that execution by firing squad and electrocution were both in violation of the South Carolina State Constitution, which bans methods that are "cruel, unusual, or corporal." The court, in their decision, stated that there was no evidence that electrocution could instantaneously or painlessly kill an inmate, writing that the idea of the electric chair inducing instant unconsciousness was based on "underlying assumptions upon which the electric chair is based, dating back to the 1800's, that have since been disproven.
The decision also stated:
"Electrocution is inconsistent with both the
concepts of evolving standards of decency
and the dignity of man.
Even if an inmate survived only fifteen or
thirty seconds, he would suffer the experience
of being burned alive – a punishment that has
long been recognized as manifestly cruel and
unusual."
Dutch postcard by Gebr. Spanjersberg N.V., Rotterdam (SPARO), no. b 78.
French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) died on 28 December 2025, at the age of 91. In the 1950s, she was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she became an animal rights activist. In the coming weeks, we will continue to post a BB postcard every day to remember her as she once was.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father, and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying to launch a modelling career and found herself on the cover of the French magazine Elle in May 1949. Her incredible beauty was readily apparent, and Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand / Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953, she attended the Cannes Film Festival, where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956, she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as an ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. In 1953, she made her first US production, Un acte d'amour / Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smash success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. The immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the filming of Et Dieu créa la femme / And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), directed by her husband, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at the time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped Brigitte Bardot's international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten', and fascination with her in America consisted of magazine photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theatres like lemmings. BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (Ralph Thomas, 1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne / La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957), which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur / Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "This Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defence attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre can shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous and deadly side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960, postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957, and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre / Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career
Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée / Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle, has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at French Films: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the high point of her career when she agreed to make this film with high-profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess, and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot, and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names was based on an actual incident, and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterwards, Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire Playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men, including Samy Frey, her co-star in La Vérité / The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Jean-Luc Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris / Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) opposite Michel Piccoli. She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres / Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires /Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses / Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewellery and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990s, she was also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal was a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularising bikini swimwear, in such early films as Manina / Woman without a Veil (Willy Rozier, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (French Films), French Films, Wikipedia and IMDb.
And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Vintage postcard. Brigitte Bardot in La vérité / The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960).
French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) died on 28 December 2025, at the age of 91. In the 1950s, she was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she became an animal rights activist. In the coming weeks, we will continue to post a BB postcard every day to remember her as she once was.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father, and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying to launch a modelling career and found herself on the cover of the French magazine Elle in May 1949. Her incredible beauty was readily apparent, and Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand / Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953, she attended the Cannes Film Festival, where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956, she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as an ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. In 1953, she made her first US production, Un acte d'amour / Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smash success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. The immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the filming of Et Dieu créa la femme / And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), directed by her husband, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at the time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme / ...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped Brigitte Bardot's international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten', and fascination with her in America consisted of magazine photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theatres like lemmings. BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (Ralph Thomas, 1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne / La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957), which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur / Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "This Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defence attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre can shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous and deadly side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960, postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957, and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre / Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career
Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée / Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle, has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at French Films: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the high point of her career when she agreed to make this film with high-profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess, and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot, and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names was based on an actual incident, and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterwards, Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire Playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men, including Samy Frey, her co-star in La Vérité / The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Jean-Luc Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris / Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) opposite Michel Piccoli. She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres / Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires /Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses / Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewellery and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990s, she was also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal was a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularising bikini swimwear, in such early films as Manina / Woman without a Veil (Willy Rozier, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the 'choucroute' ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (French Films), French Films, Wikipedia and IMDb.
And please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Also locally known as "undines", these blissful and delicate water sprites sometimes appear in the flowing and sparkling waters of the river Ticino in order to entertain and confort local bathers of different ages. Just not to offend my youthful sensibilities about decency, this one wore a green bathing suit. Usually they don't.
Gamcheon culture village was a formal slum formed in the 1950s by refugees from the Korean war. Its people worked at the nearby port down the valley. It had its own style of architecture and a tight community. After the community and neighbourhood deteriorated in the 2000s, the city together with the community worked to revitalize the slum with art, cafes shops and colours. Today it is a major tourist destination in Busan. Although the revitalization is said to have been inclusive with community participation, today it leaves a very touristified impression with many selfie taking people who wait in line for the perfect spot. It is beautiful, nontheless, and has a particular charm - local even in the neighbourhood's back alleys - which is hard to find in the more modern neighbourhoods with skyscrapers.
"The immediate cause of the Exile may never be known. In those soggy April days immediately following the event, when mobs were the rule, accusations and counter-accusations flew with regularity. As Walter Wenstrup pointed out in his pamplet A Call For Civic Order (largely ignored at the time), there are several factors which make isolating the cause largely an intellectual exercise. As Wenstrup states, '[n]either the offender(s), nor their offense(s), nor the aggrieved and/or their agents, nor the precise magickal means of this punitive action are known. One piece of the picture might help bring the rest into focus, but our scope of investigation being limited by our very isolation, patience and diligence are our only recourse.' Wenstrup himself postulated that some collective crime had precipitated the city's removal from common geography. Of course, Wenstrup himself was on more than one occasion singled out as the probable target of the Exile. . . . One of the more popular targets of public suspicion was Micah Ogden AKA Tommy Todd, one half of the popular co-ed burlesque act 'Maggie and Todd' with Alyx Scarpetta AKA Maximum Maggie. Ogden's solo portion of their nightly performances was notorious for the feats of erotic magic he performed, including the apparent summons of a female sex demon with which he simulated intercourse (amidst a complex arrangement of scarves and loincloths in order to circumvent the local decency laws) and a routine in which he danced with his shadow which some observers found offensive for its homoerotic undertones. (Ironically, such performances would be considered tame by today's standards, as any evening spent in the Robinson Tunnel clubs will illustrate.) . . . Todd and Maggie's act (as well as their romantic relationship) had ended some months prior to the Exile, and Todd had dropped out of sight. It was rumored that infernal orgies took place behind the bright yellow door of his home on South Oak Street. A recently divorced fireman accused Todd of seducing him in his dreams. In truth, Todd was in seclusion recovering from recent sexual reassignment surgery; his isolation was so complete that he did not learn of the Exile until a full week after it had happened. By that time he (more correctly, she) was the favorite scapegoat of high-rise demagogues and radio call-in shows. Todd, using the first name Tammy, granted an interview to the Star-Chronicle in which she tried to defend herself from the mounting wave of attacks, to no avail. Maximum Maggie appeared on the Channel 9 news to refute some of the charges, claiming that congress with demons had never been a part of their act and that she herself had appeared, disguised as a succubus, in those portions of Todd's act. . . . The public would not be mollified, however, and on April 14, 1967 a mob marched on Todd's home and demanded that 'he' surrender himself. (In the face of the marvels of the previous ten days, the collective refusal to accept Todd's re-gendering is perhaps unsurprising.) When Todd did not emerge, the restless crowd surged forward, only to be repelled by what one citizen described as 'some force both electrical and concussive, which caused me to lose consciousness for some minutes . . . [w]e soon found that we dared not approach the door, let alone lay hands upon it; even projectiles could not damage it.' It seems that Todd had sealed herself inside, and as far as anyone has been able to determine, she is there to this day. . . . Not long after, Maximum Maggie went into hiding as well, although she is still known to do voiceover work." (p.17-18)
Hundreds of people gathered in Plano for two rallies; a morning one and an afternoon one. We protested the continuing evil, stupidity and graft of Trump, the Republican Party, MAGA, and anyone who supports them. It is critical that this evil man and his accomplices in crime be voted out of office come November. Vote and stop this wanna-be dictator and his fascist party once and for all.