Actress Brigitte Bardot shot to worldwide fame dancing the mambo barefoot in “And God Created Woman”, her tousled hair and fierce vitality radiating a sexual magnetism not often earlier than seen in mainstream cinema.
A worldwide icon was born.
At simply 21, she scandalised censors and captivated audiences. Her free-spirited efficiency within the 1956 movie, shot by her husband Roger Vadim, marked a decisive break from the demure heroines of the earlier period.
Brigitte Bardot, usually referred to in France merely as “B.B.” and whose later years have been marked by animal rights campaigns and far-right political sympathies, has died on the age of 91, her basis stated on Sunday. The trigger was not instantly identified.
She Follows Her Inclinations
Born in Paris on September 28, 1934, Bardot grew up in an upper-middle-class family. She described herself as a shy, self-conscious youngster who “wore spectacles and had lank hair”.
By 15, nevertheless, she graced the duvet of Elle journal, launching a modelling profession that quickly led to movie.
Bardot’s character in “And God Created Woman” was the embodiment of liberated femininity. The controversy solely fuelled her attraction. Bardot turned an emblem of Nineteen Fifties and 60s France.
Her attract prolonged far past French cinema. At 15, Bob Dylan is alleged to have written his first track about her, the never-released “Song for Brigitte”, whereas Andy Warhol painted her portrait.
Bardot’s skill to subvert conventional gender roles made her not only a intercourse image, however a popular culture icon and a touchstone for shifting social attitudes.
In 1959, Simone de Beauvoir penned an article for Esquire journal through which she lionised Bardot’s conspicuous sense of freedom. “B.B. does not try to scandalise,” the feminist thinker wrote. “She follows her inclinations. She eats when she is hungry and makes love with the same unceremonious simplicity.
“Moral lapses can be corrected, but how could B.B. be cured of that dazzling virtue — genuineness? It is her very substance.”
De Beauvoir concluded: “I hope she will mature, but not change.”
I’ve Been Let Down Too Often
Despite her affect, Bardot discovered movie star life isolating. She usually spoke of being a prisoner of her personal fame, unable to take pleasure in life’s easy pleasures.
“Nobody can imagine how horrific it was, such an ordeal,” she mirrored many years later. “I couldn’t go on living like that.”
Her private life was formed by 4 marriages, broadly reported affairs, and well-documented struggles with despair.
On her twenty sixth birthday she was discovered unconscious at a home on the French Riviera after attempting to take her personal life. Rumours of one other tried suicide surfaced years later when she mysteriously cancelled a forty ninth celebration then appeared in hospital.
Alongside her appearing, Bardot loved a profitable music profession. Her collaborations with singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, together with the erotic “I love you… me neither” (“I Love You … Neither Do I”), drew each acclaim and controversy.
In the late Sixties she modelled for a bust of Marianne, the personification of the French Republic.
But she discovered little satisfaction within the reward she garnered.
“I have been very happy, very rich, very beautiful, much adulated, very famous and very unhappy,” she informed the journal Paris Match across the time of her fiftieth birthday. “I’ve been let down too often. I’ve had really terrible disappointments in my life. That is why I’ve chosen to withdraw, to live alone.”
This Is My Only Battle
Bardot made the final of her 42 movies in 1973. Disenchanted with the trade, she declared the world of cinema “rotten” and left public life.
“I will have given 20 years of my life to cinema, that’s enough,” she stated in a TV interview on the time.
She settled within the modern French resort of Saint-Tropez, the place she discovered solace amongst animals and the Mediterranean panorama.
There, she started a passionate defence of animal welfare. “This is my only battle, the only direction I want to give my life,” Bardot stated in 2013.
Her devotion to animals turned legendary. In 1986, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals, auctioning off private souvenirs the next 12 months to boost funds for her trigger.
Bardot supported high-profile activists, equivalent to anti-whaling campaigner Paul Watson, and campaigned vigorously towards animal cruelty, at occasions threatening to go away France over animal welfare disputes.
When actor Gérard Depardieu accepted Russian citizenship after a public spat with French authorities, in 2013, Bardot threatened to comply with go well with if France euthanised two sick circus elephants.
For a lot of the latter half of her life, Bardot lived alone behind excessive partitions in Saint-Tropez, surrounded by a menagerie of cats, canine and horses.
This ardour, she usually steered, was an antidote to her disappointing relationships. “I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she as soon as stated. “I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.”
Feminism Isn’t My Thing
As her advocacy intensified, so too did the backlash to her political statements.
Bardot’s public remarks on immigration, Islam and homosexuality led to a string of convictions for inciting racial hatred.
Between 1997 and 2008, she was fined six occasions by French courts for her feedback, significantly these concentrating on France’s Muslim neighborhood.
In one case, a Paris courtroom fined her €15,000 ($17,000) for describing Muslims as “this population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts”.
In 1992, she married Bernard d’Ormale, a former adviser to the far-right National Front, and later publicly endorsed the celebration’s successive leaders, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen. Bardot known as the latter “the Joan of Arc of the 21st century”.
Yet, for all her polarising views, Bardot’s affect endured, whether or not in vogue – with media noting common comebacks of her trademark coiffure – or by way of common documentaries and espresso‑desk books celebrating her uncommon impression on French cinema.
Asked by French channel BFM TV in May 2025 if she thought-about herself an emblem of the sexual revolution, she stated: “No, because before me, plenty of wild things had already happened — they didn’t wait for me. Feminism isn’t my thing; I like men.”
In the identical interview, she was requested how usually she mirrored on her movie profession. “I don’t think about it,” she stated, “but I don’t reject it, because it’s thanks to it that I’m known everywhere in the world as someone who defends animals.”
By Ingrid Melander