Director Kyle Newman has lined up his wife, Jaime King, to play the French actor, but Bardot warns that ‘sparks will fly’
Film-makers have portrayed many French celebrities in recent years: Edith Piaf, Coco Chanel and, most recently, Serge Gainsbourg have all had their lives re-enacted and rehabilitated on the silver screen.
Anyone wishing to do the same with Brigitte Bardot, however, had better watch out. The cantankerous former actor has warned that "sparks will fly" if a US director persists with reported plans to make a biopic of her – and cast his Hollywood star wife in the lead role.
"I am not OK with a film about me when I have not been told about it and when I have not given my agreement to the person playing my role," she told French radio today.
In an earlier interview, the erstwhile blond bombshell was equally strident. "A film about my life? But I'm not dead!" she exclaimed. "They wouldn't dare do it without talking to me. If they do sparks will fly."
It has been rumoured for several months that Kyle Newman, the producer and director of several moderately successful US films, is planning to make a biopic, provisionally entitled Bardot, in which his wife, Jaime King, would take centre stage.
However King, 31, could find it hard to convince her 75-year-old counterpart that she could live up to the legend. "I am typically French," said Bardot this week in reaction the news that a former fashion model from Nebraska was in line to bring her je ne sais quoi to the silver screen. "I never left France for Hollywood nor stashed my money in Switzerland," she added, for good measure.
"No one", she declared, was right for the role, whether French or foreign. "They have their own personalities but they don't have mine," she said. She claimed not to have seen Laetitia Casta's portrayal of her in Joann Sfar's Gainsbourg, Vie Héroïque.
Directors of previous French biopics have come under fire for skipping over some of the more controversial periods of their subjects' lives: La Vie en Rose ignored Piaf's activities during the Occupation, while Coco Before Chanel, a tale of the designer's early years, stopped short of her affair with a Nazi officer at the Paris Ritz.
Similarly, perhaps, any maker of a biopic about "BB" would have to decide whether or not to focus exclusively on her showbusiness career, which ended when she quit the cinema aged 38, or to follow her later transformation from sex symbol to animal rights activist and champion of the reactionary right.
The coquettish star of Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris has been repeatedly fined for inciting racial hatred and frequently makes derogatory remarks about immigration, Islam and homosexuality. Today, the day after French Muslims began observing Ramadan, she declared that halal meat had "invaded France".
Applauding Nicolas Sarkozy and his interior minister for their recently announced intention to revoke the citizenship of certain criminals "of foreign origin", she said: "Why should they continue to be French when all they do is do stupid, scummy things? … There is a certain dignity to being French." She added: "I have the courage of my convictions. I don't beat around the bush and I am about the only one who doesn't in this bloody country."
Lizzy Davies in Paris | guardian.co.uk, 12 August 2010
