Yeah it must have been very hard to be the sister of a living myth. Mijanou dropped acting because both the audience and the film makers were expecting her to be like Brigitte (her voice and the way she talked were quite similar to B
. It's a shame because Deneuve and Dorléac proved it was possible for two sisters to coexist in the film industry, but Mijanou probably wasn't really made for that. She once said she was eventually glad of how things turned out because she had a happy life (she's married to actor Patrick Bauchau) whereas Brigitte became a prisoner of her extreme fame and was never able to live normally again.
So basically... poor Mijanou was the Lady Edith to Brigitte's Lady Mary?
Poor girl... imagine trying to break into acting with
that comparison being thrown at you all the time?
Which isn't to say Mijanou wasn't a nice looking girl... she had a perfectly pleasant face and who doesn't love freckles? But... yeah, I can see why she'd quite after being compared to her incandescent sister after enough time. Nice to see that she found her happy ending, however.
And it's so wild to think that Brigitte was considered the "plain" sister during her youth!
But then, from what I've read up on BB, she apparently didn't have the sort of "look" that was considered beautiful at the time, right? And when you look at just her face (ignoring that fantastic figure that would have captivated during any time period!), you can k
iiiiiiiind of see why. She just didn't have the type of "beauty" that was appreciated in the 1940s and initially in the 1950's... though she sure changed
that soon!
When you look at just BB's face, you notice she really
isn't a classical beauty. In her youth, her cheeks were quite round, her eyes were quite small (not big doe eyes, but longer, more cat-like eyes), her mouth was
very full in proportion to her face (whereas the "European ideal" has often been thinner lips for women), and her chin is definitely quite square and has a cleft in it that is
definitely not standard for many women considered to be beautiful. Facially alone, she would probably be considered less "pretty" in the usual sense than someone like, say, Grace Kelly. (Who is
the definite "aristocratic" blond in American cinema!)
But that's more than compensated by BB's liveliness and sensuality, so much so that when you look at her, you don't look so much at her "flaws" as her most attractive features-- her lush hair, the spark in her dark eyes, her bright grin, her amazing body, the easy way she wore her clothes, her graceful gestures, her sexy voice, etc. In fact, I think I like BB all the better for
not looking so perfect or so close to some sort of ideal... and I think that's what makes BB so much more
memorable than the scores of blondes who try to imitate her. They're not enough out-of-the-mold to startle your eyes into remembering them!
Conventional Beauty + Arresting Flaws + Amazing Style = Icon? I think we're on the verge of discovering a new mathematical formula here...