Donna Mitchell by Richard Avedon 1971

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Richard Avedon (1923-2004) est un photographe de mode puis un portraitiste américain. Il a réalisé un travail qui allait du reportage photo à la mode, des orphelins de Danang pendant la guerre du Viêt Nam aux portraits de Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot ou Sophia Loren. Il restera connu pour ses innombrables portraits en noir et blanc. Avedon a su faire du portrait photographique un art véritable après avoir initialement rencontré le succès avec la photographie de mode.

Richard Avedon (1923-2004) was an American fashion and portrait photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century".

Gloria Swanson

Gloria Swanson
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Gloria Swanson, née Gloria Josephine May Swanson1 le 27 mars 1899 à Chicago et morte le 4 avril 1983 à New York, est une actrice américaine. Grande star du cinéma muet, sa carrière décline à l'arrivée du parlant, mais elle renoue avec le succès dans Boulevard du crépuscule (1950) qui la met en scène en star déchue du cinéma muet.

Gloria May Josephine Swanson (1899-1983) was an American actress and producer best known for her role as Norma Desmond, a reclusive silent film star, in the critically acclaimed 1950 film Sunset Boulevard.

Brigitte Bardot wearing Paco Rabanne

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Brigitte Bardot, née le 28 septembre 1934, est une actrice de cinéma, mannequin et chanteuse française. Elle est également militante de la cause animale, fondatrice et présidente de la fondation qui porte son nom.

Brigitte Bardot (born 28 September 1934) is a French actress, singer and fashion model, who later became an animal rights activist. She was one of the best known sex symbols of the 1950s and 1960s and was widely referred to by her initials, B.B.

Carole Lombard 1928

Carole Lombard 1928
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Carole Lombard (née Jane Alice Peters le 6 octobre 1908 à Fort Wayne, Indiana, États-Unis – décédée le 16 janvier 1942) est une actrice américaine de la première moitié du xxe siècle. Elle est surtout connue pour ses rôles dans des comédies des années 1930 devenues des classiques. 

Carole Lombard (1908-1942) was American film actress. She was particularly noted for her energetic, often off-beat roles in the screwball comedies of the 1930s. She was the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s.

Footit and Chocolat











English clown Footit (sometimes spelled Foottit, or Footitt), real name George Tudor Hall, born in Manchester in 1864, trained as an equestrian acrobat with his father's circus, and by 1880 his appearances with Sanger's Circus established him as a leading horseback clown. His double Raphaël (or Rafael) Padilla, known as Chocolat, also known as Raphael de Leios, was born a slave in Cuba in 1868. Orphaned, the boy was sold to a Portuguese merchant as a farmhand in Spain. At 14 he fled, and the white-face clown Tony Grice found him on the Bilbao docks. Impressed with his physical strength and his dancing skills, Grice became his partner in some circus turns at Cirque Medrano. Nicknamed ‘Chocolat’, Padilla was first noticed in a sketch where he rode an uncontrollable mule.

Padilla then made his decisive encounter with George Footit, a partnership that lasted twenty years, flourishing throughout the 1890s and early 1900s at the most fashionable Parisian circus, the Noveau Cirque. The duo'’s routine was between an authoritarian white Clown, and a stupid poor Negro, Augustus, who at the end of each skit receives a correction: "Mr. Chocolate, I'm going to have to hit you ... ". Their slapstick antics, in which Chocolat was the perenial victim of the violent, but impassive Footit, were popular with all levels of society, attracting the attention of many intellectuals and artists. Off stage, Chocolat was full of grace and self-assurance; onstage, ‘'a docile, stupid whipping-boy'’.

A Photoscenograph film of their sketch Guillaume Tell provided the basis for a coloured photo-band projected at Emile Reynaud's Théâtre Optique in the Musée Grevin in August 1896; a few images survive. They were also filmed by the Lumière Cinématographe around 1899, in five (extant) shorts: La chaise en bascule, Boxeurs, Acrobates sur une chaise, Le Policeman, and La mort de Chocolat. Their early sound film productions Entrée des échasses and a version of their skit Guillaume Tell (1900) were restored in 2012 as part of the compilation Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre: Visions animées des artistes célèbres. In 1905 the duo'’s Noveau Cirque contract was not renewed, the Dreyfus affair having had the effect of politicizing racial issues. Their joint career experienced its swan song at the Folies-Bergère, and they parted in 1910.

Footit appeared on the stage, made an unsuccessful attempt to start his own circus, and then ran a bar in Paris. Chocolate, meanwhile, tried his luck as an actor before returning to the circus with his adopted son Eugene Grimaldi, but without success. He died an impoverished alcoholic in Bordeaux, aged 49. Raphaël ‘'Chocolat’' Padilla was painted, drawn, sketched many times by Toulouse-Lautrec (‘'Chocolat dancing in a bar’'), celebrated by Colette (in the novel Gigi ), posed for advertisements (Hève Soap), and some say was Samuel Beckett’'s inspiration for the slave Lucky in Waiting for Godot. Historian Gerard Noiriel remarks: 'The duo symbolized the relationship between whites and blacks at the time. It was a representation of colonial domination'.