Films often portray short hair on women as a product of illness, or even criminality. In Bonjour Tristesse, a young Jean Seberg showed the powerful message a short 'do can send out

Otto Preminger's lush CinemaScope melodrama Bonjour Tristesse, rereleased this week, is a showcase for gorgeousness. The Côte d'Azur glitters in pristine, vibrant Technicolor; Paris smoulders in smoky monochrome. But while the film's ostensible love triangle of Deborah Kerr, David Niven and Mylène Demongeot pose prettily on the Riviera in costumes by Givenchy and Hermès, the star of this show is 20-year-old Jean Seberg. In a chic cocktail dress or a swimsuit and a man's denim shirt, Seberg is radiantly beautiful, and with that signature pixie crop, unforgettably, arrestingly cool too.

A couple of years later, Seberg would take her best-known role, as the très moderne American girl Patricia in Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle. It is as Patricia that Seberg's insouciant image made its way on to posters tacked to generations of film students' walls. In that film, her sweet face contrasted with that raw, chopped 'do to great effect: the vision of a "good girl" gone hipster, charming and double-crossing her wannabe gangster boyfriend.

The seeds of Patricia are sown in Bonjour Tristesse's petulant Cécile (a debt Godard acknowledged), and if you're a fan of her classic crop, made famous by the later film, you need to know that Bonjour Tristesse is its finest moment. Combed neatly behind diamond-studded earlobes in a Paris club, or spiky and drenched with sea water on the Riviera – the haircut and the way she wears it tell you almost everything you need to know about Cécile's character.

Teenage Cécile's naive do separates her from the grownups she longs to join: her father's parade of peroxide blondes, and Kerr's sophisticated Anne, with each strand of her red hair pinned and lacquered into a bun at the nape of her neck.

Worn today, the pixie crop still stands for what it isn't – it is the opposite of a simpering, bland Middleton wave, without the cheap tricks of an attention-grabbing punk cut. The pixie suggests a natural elegance, but, on the right woman, can be unnerving in its nothing-to-hide boldness.

Jean Seberg alongside David Niven in Bonjour Tristesse. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/COLUMBIA

Seberg's big break depended on her going for the chop, too. She first cut her hair when Preminger chose her from a nationwide open audition to star in Saint Joan – and it's a happy accident of cinema and fashion that the warrior-saint look suited her so well. Seberg with long hair, later in her career (hymning domestic bliss in Paint Your Wagon, perhaps), just isn't the same. These days, it's likely that more people could identify Seberg from the crop alone than could tell you about her unhappy life story (she was cruelly victimised by the FBI, and killed herself when she was just 40 years old).

We don't use the phrase style icon lightly, but Jean Seberg surely qualifies. If you see a woman rocking a pixie crop on the street today, the chances are she came under the influence of the Seberg effect before she stepped into the hairdresser's chair. Who, me? Guilty as charged.

Sadly, the pixie crop is often treated badly, as when famous actors cut their hair to play a cancer patient, prisoner or other trauma case, and embrace the extensions as soon as the fuss dies down. To celebrate Seberg and Bonjour Tristesse, here are our top five pixie-crop-wearing women.

Lya De Putti

Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

Sally Bowles herself is fictional, so doesn't qualify for our list. However, her idol, Hungarian ballet dancer turned film actor Lya di Putti, does. One of the original vamps of the silent screen, De Putti wore her hair short, either bobbed or in a sharp "shingle" cut, which is wickedly pixieish. The effect is androgynous but, paired with that heavy-duty vamp makeup, mysterious and sexy too – reflecting the femme fatale roles that made her famous.

Annie Lennox

Photograph: Brian Rasic/Rex Features

From her Eurythmics-era neon orange buzz cut to her current blond crop, Annie Lennox has never had time for split ends. Lennox, who from her music to her activism has always had something to say for herself, epitomises the pixie crop as the confident woman's haircut – it is impossible to imagine her hiding behind her fringe or staying in to wash her hair.

Sharon Stone

Photograph: Jim Smeal/WireImage

Pixies aren't just for waifs. Stone is always hot, but, in our humble opinion, she looked her best when she went for the crop. At the Oscars in 1998, pairing the pixie with a Vera Wang evening skirt and one of her husband's shirts, she was on fire.

Emma Watson

Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

AKA the pixie that was gone too soon. Watson's post-Potter chop was every bit as chic as it was cathartic. "Right, I'm 20, I'm not a little girl any more," she said of the cut, and promptly landed a Vogue cover. Watson may yet return to the fold, though. "I've never felt so confident as I did with short hair – I felt really good in my own skin. If I had it my way, I would have just kept it short forever," she said just last year, and Beyoncé's recent blink-and-miss-it pixie cut nearly tempted her back to the salon. Watch this barnet.

Judi Dench

Photograph: Fred Duval/FilmMagic

The award for long service and good conduct goes to … Dame Judi Dench, a devotee of the pixie since the 60s and still as light-headed as ever. Dench has fantastic cheekbones and arched eyebrows in her favour, it's true, but her 'do is a reminder that the pixie crop does not only suit skinny young models and androgynous types. Plus, a silver pixie is stone-cold foxy.

Honorable mentions

Mia Farrow in 1968's Rosemary's Baby. Photograph: Archive Photos/Getty Images

Mia Farrow (who debunks the idea that Vidal Sassoon styled her crop for Rosemary's Baby: "I had literally cut it myself earlier that year – with a pair of fingernail scissors – while working on the Peyton Place TV series") … Halle Berry (a Bond girl with a pixie cut? Why not?) … Michelle Williams ("I cut it for the one straight man who has ever liked short hair and I wear it in memorial of somebody who really loved it") … Erin O'Connor (shades of De Putti, don't you think?)

• Bonjour Tristesse is released on 30 August.