Brigitte Bardot, French Star and Sex Symbol, Dies at 91
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Brigitte Bardot, the iconic international screen siren who retired from acting to become an animal rights activist, died Sunday , according to a representative from animal protection charity The Brigitte Bardot Foundation. She was 91.
Bardot ranked among the most beautiful women of all time, according to Esquire and legions of admirers. At the height of her fame, her last name was as indelible as Marilyn Monroe’s first. “Along with General de Gaulle and the Eiffel Tower, I am perhaps the best-known French person in the world!” she once wrote. French writer Simone de Beauvoir observed in 1962 that “Bardot is as important an export [to France] as Renault automobiles.” In 1970, she was immortalized in sculpture by artist Aslan as Marianne, the personification of the French Republic.
Bardot, also known as B.B., rose to stardom in the 1950s and ’60s, when foreign films found mainstream success in America, partly because of their more sexually explicit content. In Bardot’s 1956 breakout film, her then husband Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman , she is first glimpsed sunbathing naked. Playing off the film’s title, the provocative tagline for the American release was, “But the Devil invented Brigitte Bardot.”
According to Vadim’s New York Times obituary , a climactic scene in that film in which Bardot danced barefoot on a table “is often cited as a breakthrough in what was considered permissible to show on screen.” Vadim is quoted: “There was really nothing shocking in what Brigitte did. What was provocative was her natural sensuality.”
The luxuriantly blonde Bardot was a fresh, naturalistic departure from the more glamorous and studied stars of the era. She was “a sex symbol, but talked like a woman you could meet on the street,” according to the documentary Discovering Brigitte Bardot .
In her memoir, Initiales B.B. —published in France in 1996—Bardot also dished about her many lovers, including actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Warren Beatty and musician Serge Gainsbourg. She wrote of gaining entrance to Marlon Brando’s hotel room disguised as a chambermaid, then fleeing because of the room’s smell and slovenliness.
Fame and celebrity “made me very unhappy,” Bardot wrote in her 2018 memoir, Tears of Battle: An Animal Rights Memoir . “I never adapted to it. I lived a unique existence, often one filled with celebrities, sometimes one of high society. But deep down I did not belong…. Life could not be as pointless as what I was seeing.”
In 1973, at the age of 39, Bardot left acting to devote herself to animal rights. After a failed attempt at philanthropy in the late 1970s, she created the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, which would define the remainder of her life, in 1986. “I have no more friends from those days (as an actress),” she told The New York Times in 1994. “I only live in the world of animal protection. I speak only of that. I think only of that. I am obsessed.” In recent years, though, her increasingly controversial far-right attitudes, impolitic statements, and anti-Muslim comments left her with a more complicated legacy.
Bardot was born on September 28, 1934. She was an aspiring ballerina who, as a young teen, was accepted at the National Superior Conservatory of Paris. In 1949, she modeled in a fashion show and, within one year, graced the cover of Elle magazine. Roger Vadim met then 15-year-old Bardot when he was 21.
She had a few films to her credit, including the title role in Manina, the Girl in the Bikini , as the film was called in America. It was released in 1952, the same year that she married Vadim. In And God Created Woman , his first film, she portrayed a restless woman who scandalizes Saint-Tropez and sparks a bitter rivalry between two brothers. “That girl was created to destroy men,” one obsessed character notes.
She became an international sensation. Debra Ollivier, author of What French Women Know: About Love, Sex and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind , observed that Bardot was “an icon of the sexual revolution and a stereotype of the free-spirited French woman who defied the Puritan norms of her time.”
Among her other most memorable films are the comedy La Parisienne (1957); En cas de malheur ( Love Is My Profession, 1958), which paired Bardot with the legendary French actor Jean Gabin; Viva Maria! , a comedy in which she costarred with Jeanne Moreau and for which she was nominated for a BAFTA award; and Contempt , Jean-Luc Godard’s jaundiced look at commercial Hollywood filmmaking. He pointedly did not include a nude scene in the film—though after pressure from the film’s financiers, Godard did shoot an opening scene in which Bardot’s nude character asks her husband to rate the different parts of her body. She also appeared as herself in the charming 1964 American family comedy, Dear Brigitte , starring James Stewart and Bill Mumy as a boy who is infatuated with the actress.
Bardot parlayed her film stardom into a side gig as a sultry pop singer. She released several albums, beginning in 1963 with Brigitte .
Malle’s Vie Privée ( A Very Private Affair ), released in 1962, dealt with a superstar unable to cope with fame. Bardot herself was so relentlessly hounded by photographers at the height of her fame that she could not leave her apartment to give birth to her son, Nicolas Charrier. She attempted suicide on four reported occasions, once shortly after Nicolas was born.
At the age of 39, she turned her back on acting to devote herself to animal rights and protection. “I do not want to be a part of (the human species),” she began Tears of Battle . “As long as the animal is considered an inferior species, as long as we kill him for our own needs, leisure, and pleasure, I will not be part of this arrogant and bloodthirsty race.”
After one false start, Bardot sold “everything of value,” including her “mythical” Saint-Tropez property to fund the Brigitte Bardot Foundation. “I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she once proclaimed. “I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.”
She spent the last decades of her life living in seclusion with her fourth husband, Bernard d’Ormale, an aide of far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen . They married in 1992. Her later years were marked by controversial statements of support for Le Pen, as well as for published anti-Muslim comments. French courts fined her six times for “inciting racial hatred.”
In January 2018, she backed an open letter from 100 prominent French women that criticized the #MeToo movement. She also accused some actresses of “being hypocritical and ridiculous” in claiming harassment, and told the French magazine Paris Match , “I found it charming when men told me that I was beautiful or I had a nice little backside.”
But Bardot’s views were not all hardline conservative. In 2008, Bardot called Sarah Palin, then presidential candidate John McCain’s running mate, “a disgrace to women,” calling her out for her denials of climate change and for her advocating gun rights. Referring to Palin’s oft-quoted hockey mom/pitbull comparison, Bardot said, “I know dogs well and I can assure you that no pitbull, no dog, nor any other animal is as dangerous as you.”
Bardot aged as she lived: on her own terms, speaking her mind, and eschewing cosmetic surgery. In a terse interview with Alain Elkann in 2014, she professed not to miss her fame, stardom, or acting. When asked, “How do you live today?” she responded, “The way I like.” When asked whether she knew that she was considered a legend, she answered, “No, but luckily, you have reminded me.”
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A once great female role model has died.
She was no Catherine Deneuve.
I include her as well. And the role models don't all have to be French.
Brigitte Bardot never had a hit movie in America. Her celebrity in the US was entirely based on her sex symbol status.
Her animal activism was of course admirable.
Yes, it was. But being a sex symbol is no inspiration for young women
How about simply being at one's best?
doing what? She was an animal activist which I admire but she was a sex symbol for years. That's not an aspiration for young women
Setting an example, just like Jacqueline Kennedy did.
You wouldn't see them with rings in their noses or tattoos.
Do you have a problem with people expressing themselves?
Mrs. Kennedy was a woman of dignity and grace. She didn't need to take her clothes off to be a "role model" Any comparison between Mrs K and BB is just foolish and downright assinine