The ultimate French sex kitten was just one year away from her breakthrough role in And God Created Woman when she went for a twirl at the eighth Cannes Film Festival. Now a staunch animal-rights activist, La Bardot turns 77 this September.
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The future Princess of Monaco met her husband at the festival in 1955, where she brought The Country Girl, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
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Two of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite stars danced tête-à-tête at Les Ambassadeurs during the 12th-annual festival. Grant’s daughter, Jennifer, recently published an affectionate memoir of her father.
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The French actress, accompanied by director Roman Polanski at the 1965 festival. Their film Repulsion, Polanski’s first in English, would debut the following month.
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Looking very much like a man who would one day play Austin Powers’ father, Michael Caine and some cheeky models show their support for Caine’s film Alfie, which won a special jury prize at the 1966 festival.
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Thirteen-year-old Jodie Foster and 32-year-old Robert DeNiro at a press conference for Taxi Driver, which nabbed the Palme d’Or for 1976 at Cannes. DeNiro is the president of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival jury.
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Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange make an appearance at the 33rd-annual festival, where their remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice was screened out of competition.
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The French actress jumps for joie at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, where her movie Rendez-vous won the Best Director award for André Téchiné.
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Long before she was France’s first lady, Carla Bruni turned up at Cannes with French philosopher Luc Ferry. Twelve years later, Ferry (who became the country’s minister of education) was at the dinner party the night Bruni met Nicolas Sarkozy, and fittingly, he was philosophical about his relationship with the former model: "I was between Laurent Fabius and Mick Jagger," he once joked. Bruni will miss Cannes this year for “ personal reasons” but the film she has a small role in—Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris—opened the festival.
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At the 48th Cannes Film Festival, Sharon Stone played peek-a-boo with the paparazzi on the red carpet, where she was supporting her Western The Quick and the Dead, which was shown out of competition.
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Though Johnny Depp attended the 1998 Cannes Film Festival with his then-girlfriend Kate Moss, he posed for the cameras with Benicio Del Toro, his costar in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was shown in competition that year.
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To support one of his last movies, Entrapment, Sean Connery made an appearance with costar Catherine Zeta-Jones at the 1999 festival. Six years later, at the age of 75, he retired from acting, telling a Scottish paper: "I'm fed up with the idiots ... the ever-widening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who green-light the movies." But Connery being Connery, never said never.
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In 2000, Björk crossed over from music to film with the lead role in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. The film won the Palme d’Or that year and Björk was named Best Actress. Several months after Cannes, Björk’s song from the movie, “I’ve Seen It All,” was nominated for an Oscar and she attended the award ceremony in her infamous swan dress. Von Trier’s new film, Melancholia, will be shown at Cannes this year.
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Some stars show up at Cannes to support movies in (and out) of competition—others just want to be seen. In 2001, the Muscles from Brussels pumped without irony and let the paparazzi photograph his workout aboard a yacht.
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They may have played enemies in X-Men 3: The Last Stand, but Rebecca Romijn and Halle Berry were all smiles on the red carpet at the 2006 festival.
Spanish star Penelope Cruz looks positively shocked on the red carpet in 2006, perhaps amazed that her film that year—Pedro Almodovar’s Volver—won both best screenplay and best female ensemble. That same year, Cruz was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Volver. Almodovar will premiere his new film, The Skin I Inhabit, at the festival this year.
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The two former Sexiest Men Alive show why they earned the title at the 2007 festival, where Ocean’s Thirteen was shown out of competition. Pitt’s new film—Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life —will premiere this year at Cannes.
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British actress Kate Beckinsale didn’t have a film at Cannes in 2010, but she served on the jury, along with Benicio Del Toro and Tim Burton, who was the jury president. They awarded the Palme d’Or to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
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