Michelle Bardeaux

Michele Bardeaux is an actress, known for The Boy Who Could Fly, 21 Jump Street and Mount Royal. She began her acting career when she was a teenager, performing in film and television and, at the age of nineteen moved to Paris, France after receiving the offer to model there. Soon after her arrival she was flown to Morocco to be photographed by famed photographer, Mario Testino, for multiple issues of Glamour Magazine. She spent one week there, posing amidst the fabled Atlas Mountains and in a palatial home in Marrakech. She subsequently became known as the "Glamour Girl" and also went on to pose for Vogue, Cosmopolitan and many other top magazines in fashion capitals around the world, including Paris, Milan and New York. As a model she was known for her ethereal beauty and hourglass figure, accented by her tiny waist. Photographers often photographed her facial features in extreme close-up, focusing on her cat-like green eyes, porcelain skin and naturally full lips. She once appeared on the cover of Madame Figaro magazine showing only her lips. She was also known for her vocal and active stance against animal cruelty, and from the beginning refused to model fur, turning down jobs in top magazines, etc. and eventually having this written into her contracts, during a period when awareness of this kind in the fashion industry was extremely low. She was one of the first models of her time to take this stand, paving the way for others, and has been called a pioneer in this regard. She was discovered for a music video while taking a nap on the couch of Pin-Up Studios in Paris. During a break of a photo shoot for Glamour Magazine, she opened her eyes to find another photographer asking her to make a sad face. Soon afterward, she traveled to Normandy, where she portrayed "The Woman on the Train" in the video for Leonard Cohen's First We Take Manhattan. The following month she starred in Reunion, the final episode of the television series, Mount Royal, as Jenny, a distraught teenager, hitchhiking across France, who finds refuge with a prominent family in their palace in the French countryside. Later that same year, she demonstrated her versatility as a comic actress in the feature film, American Boyfriends (the sequel to My American Cousin), as an earnest and nervous young woman in the 1960s, driving a group of friends over the border between Canada and the United States on a quest for love and adventure. The next year, when she attended the premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the press hardly believed that she was the same actress as in the movie, because her appearance, voice and mannerisms in the film were so different. She had by then moved to New York for a time, living for several weeks at the Manhattan home of her American agent, the iconic Eileen Ford, founder (with her husband) of the Ford Modeling Agency. She continued with her acting career, but found she was turning down more roles than she could accept, as she felt that in many movies of that time, feminine beauty was being exploited in increasingly gratuitous and negative ways. In 2007 she flew to England to direct and act in her own movie, The Liberation of Cathy, which she wrote, shot on real black and white film, and which was a kind of spiritual sequel to the novel, Wuthering Heights.