The starlets, the stories, the champagne - and the movies. Is Cannes the best film festival in the world? Mais bien sur.
By Sukhdev Sandhu
Last Updated: 12:45PM BST 11 May 2009
US actress Rose McGowan poses at Cannes Photo: Getty
The movie moguls, photographers and revellers bottlenecked around the Palais des Festivals at Cannes are always far too busy to glance at, let alone study, the statue of the gowned man that stands near the waterfront. Henry Brougham, for that's his name, was a Scotsman who not only founded the influential Edinburgh Review journal, but was also one of the 19th century's most famous anti-slavery campaigners.
In 1835, turned back from cholera-stricken Nice where he had hoped to spend his winter vacation, he ended up at a small fishing village called Cannes. He fell in love with the place and returned throughout the next four decades, in the process making it a key destination for his friends and fellow aristocrats.
These days, when Cannes is seen as the acme of French glamour and style, it's hard to imagine that the world's most famous film festival might not exist were it not for a Brit, a former Lord High Chancellor at that.
But it also took the efforts of an Italian – Benito Mussolini, not normally noted as a cinephile – to make the Riviera so celebrated: throughout the Thirties he urged the organisers of the Venice Film Festival to treat their event as fascist propaganda so that other nations, duly repelled, started up their competitions.
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