All All. Sign In. Deaths: July List activity. Bernadette Lafont. Actress Director Writer Paulette Her mother always wanted a boy to name Bernard and, once she gave birth to a girl, she enjoyed to hold this against all the catholics she knew as the proof that their God either was blind or didn't exist. Often dressed as a boy and nicknamed Bernard, Bernadette nevertheless had a great relationship with her parents.
She proved to be a gifted student and she did three little tours and about twenty galas there. She also began to develop a passion for film from an early age, adopting Brigitte Bardot and Marina Vlady as role models. Blain found his first relevant film role in Julien Duvivier 's brilliant thriller Deadlier Than the Male and Bernadette spent a lot of time with him on the movie's set, something that made her fascination with cinema grow even bigger.
Others think that the roots of this new school of cinema can be found in the early shorts of Jacques Rivette , Jean-Luc Godard and Truffaut. The latter's The Mischief Makers is certainly one of the most significant of these ground-breaking works and happens to be the project for which Blain was recruited. The two actors stayed at the house of Bernadette's parents for the entire shooting of the short. She chose to act in bare feet the whole time to make a homage to Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa and, at the same time, a favour to Blain, not exactly a man of exceptional height.
Truffaut managed to get the best out of the young actress through rather unorthodox methods at times like threatening to slap her hadn't she cried convincingly , but they established a great chemistry in the end and he taught her not to look at someone like Bardot as a source of inspiration, since the big star didn't possess any gift Bernadette should have been jealous of. The latter had already asked her to appear in his debut feature film by the time Truffaut had proposed her to star in "Les Mistons": she had accepted both offers simultaneously and, once the shooting of the short movie was over, she immediately embarked on another adventure.
Chabrol's atmospheric Le Beau Serge is now officially considered the movie that kickstarted the French New Wave: it was shot in Sardent, where the director had spent many of his childhood years. Bernadette got the juicy role of Serge's slutty sister-in-law and lover, Marie. This role of a very impudent and provocative woman of slightly vulgar charms allowed her to introduce the French audience to a new female image that was very much different from the ones usually found in the cinema of the period and worked as a prototype to the unforgettable gallery of "bad girl" types her cinematic work will forever be strictly associated to.
