French icons who walked the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival From being a young actress in her early days to being president of the jury for some of them

Yesterday, the Venice International Film Festival, also known as the Venice Film Festival, rolled out its red carpet for the 81st time, welcoming a carefully selected group of celebrities from the world of cinema. Though this tradition is Italian, the film festival is international and not exclusively reserved for artists from Italy. This year, four French films are competing, including a cinematic adaptation of the book Leurs enfants après eux, winner of the Goncourt Prize. Film festivals also mean stars and icons of the big screen. So let’s take this opportunity to look back over the years at some of these icons, symbols of French elegance and chic, who have had the honor of gracing the red carpet, sometimes even leaving with a Lion d'or in hand, and remain a source of great pride for France today.

Brigitte Bardot

In the late 1950s, specifically in 1958, the singer of La Madrague and the one credited with the idea of wearing ballerinas as street shoes attended Venice with her then-partner Sacha Distel to present the film In Case of Adversity, a Franco-Italian production by Claude Autant-Lara based on the novel by Georges Simenon, in which she played Yvette, a bold and criminal young prostitute. Just a few years earlier, during the festival's 10th edition in 1953, the singer-actress had already made a splash, arm in arm with another suitor, Kirk Douglas.