Bernadette Lafont burst onto the scene with a body and an attitude that was radically modern in 1960s cinema and was one of the principal muses of the French New Wave. François Truffaut directed her first screen appearance in his famous short film Les Mistons, shot in Nimes in 1957. She plays a sensual young woman on a bicycle, eyed up by the local rascals, alongside Gérard Blain.

The New Wave filmmakers would remain faithful to Lafont and she would continue to appear in their movies long after the movement had come to an end. François Truffaut offered her the lead role in Une belle fille comme moi in 1972, a year earlier she had taken part in the experimental adventure Out 1 (a modern adaptation by Jacques Rivette of Balzac’s History of the Thirteen - a partially improvised film some twelve and a half hours long) and she worked with Claude Chabrol in Violette Nozière, Inspecteur Lavardin and Masques.

In the comedy department, its was perhaps Jean-Pierre Mocky who used Bernadette Lafont’s talents to the full in a series of dark and cynical comedies, which, as always with Mocky, were pretexts for outstanding performances: Le Pactole, Les Saisons du plaisir, Une nuit à l’assemblée nationale, Ville à vendre.

Lafont laid claim to a precious and explosive attitude inherited from the French popular actresses of the 1930s and nonconformist and anti-bourgeois rebelliousness.