Brigitte Bardot 13 Unseen Photographs, London 1968, Dadiani Fine Art

Blonde bombshell Brigitte Bardot soared onto the big screen in the 1950s as a glamorous 18-year-old French actress, and achieved such notoriety for her effortless sex appeal that she actually coined the phrase 'sex kitten'. But did you know that when she was working in London to promote her latest film, co-starring the star of James Bond, Sean Connery, Bardot spent an afternoon with the most famous paparazzi photographer in the world? 
Dadiani Fine Art exhibition
These 13 images taken by radical young photographer Ray Bellisario in 1968 capture Bardot during that fateful afternoon and evening in a Bond Street pub and Mayfair hotel. ‘All the photographs are from that one weekend,’ Bellisario explains. ‘You could say the whole thing tells the tale of our “petite affaire”’. Sneaking Bardot away from a hoard of press, Bellisario recalls how, ‘I’d just bought a new car. It was a Ford Consul which I’d parked right behind us. So I grabbed her arm and I said, ‘Come with me,’ and she did! And she said, “Oh, this is fun, I’ve been kidnapped!”’
Ray Bellisario | photographer & stardom
Ray Bellisario, paparazzi photographer extraordinaire, was obsessed with the Royal Family and was so provocative in his activities that Prince Phillip warned he should be thrown into the Tower of London. His furious stalking of the Royals led him to be blacklisted by the palace and his photographs could not be published in British papers. 
This small photography exhibition in Mayfair relives all the glamour of Bardot's oozing sexuality and her curious escapes with the world's most hated paparazzo, Ray Bellisario.