Obituary: Roger Vadim ; Vadim's and God Created Woman Not Only Made Brigitte Bardot an International Star but Took the Continental Film into Mainstream Cinema

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THE FRENCH film director Roger Vadim, who discovered Brigitte Bardot and expanded the boundaries of sexual explicitness on screen with his first film And God Created Woman, once said, "You wouldn't ask Rodin to make an ugly sculpture, or me to make a film with an ugly woman." Bardot was the first of his five wives. Another was Jane Fonda, who starred in his exotic spoof Barbarella, and Catherine Deneuve was his mistress. Though Vadim won praise as a film and theatre director, actor and writer, it is for his passionately sensual film work with a succession of beautiful women that he will be remembered.

Of Ukrainian-French descent, he was born Roger Vadim Plemiannikov in …