Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson. According to one critic, the biggest problem that our castaways had to come to terms with

is that his private life has been far more interesting to the general public than any film he chose to make.

Indeed, if he made his life story into a film, the female leads were played by Brigitte Bardot,

Catherine de Nerve, and Jane Fonder, all of whom shared his life at one time or another.

In spite of those distractions and others equally glamorous, he's made more than 20 films,

written a novel, and published two volumes of autobiography.

Here's Roger Vadim.

Roger, what sort of a background did you come from?

My father was born in Russia in Kiev and left during the revolution,

became a French citizen and a French diplomat, it was a French consul. Then we were living out of France in Egypt, in Turkey.

It was going to be named in post at Jerusalem when during a summer in France.

I was very young and he was only 34.

He died suddenly from a hard attack,

which of course drastically changed our family lifestyle.

What happened?

He just died one morning when we were having breakfast in a little town in the mountains,

French Alps, and a few hours after he was dead, which is quite rare for such a young man.

And my mother was left without money because, you know, it was just a diplomat such a little time that he didn't have time to have a good threat.

Soon after that, it was World War II.

Then not only my mother had to face a problem of raising alone to children, I have a sister, but also to find

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