Brigitte Bardot, the French actor idealized for her magnificence and heralded within the midcentury because the prototype of liberated feminine sexuality, has died at 91.
Lengthy withdrawn from the leisure business, Bardot died at her house in southern France, Bruno Jacquelin of the Brigitte Bardot Basis for the safety of animals confirmed to the Related Press. He gave no reason behind demise. Bardot had handled infirm well being lately, together with hospitalization for a respiratory problem in July 2023 and extra hospital stays in 2025.
Bardot was identified for being mercurial, self-destructive and vulnerable to reckless amorous affairs with women and men. She was a style icon and media darling who left performing at 39 and lived out the remainder of her years in close to seclusion, rising periodically to champion animal rights, lecture about ethical decay and espouse bigoted political opinions.
And, as if in protest of her famed magnificence, Bardot fortunately allowed herself to age naturally.
“With me, life is made up solely of the perfect and the worst, of affection and hate,” she advised the Guardian in 1996. “All the things that occurred to me was extreme.”
In her prime, Bardot was thought-about a nationwide treasure in France, obtained by President Charles de Gaulle on the Élysée Palace and analyzed exhaustively by existentialist thinker Simone de Beauvoir. She was the lady whose poster adorned the bed room of a teenage John Lennon.
Whereas Marilyn Monroe was enjoying it coy, Bardot was forthright and free about her sexuality, sleeping together with her main males with out apology, sweaty and writhing barefoot on a desk within the controversial 1956 movie “…And God Created Lady.” Although lots of her movies have been largely forgettable, she projected a radical sense of self-empowerment for girls that had a long-lasting cultural affect.
Born Sept. 28, 1934, in Paris, the daughter of a Parisian manufacturing unit proprietor and his socialite spouse, Bardot and her youthful sister have been raised in a non secular Catholic house.
Bardot studied ballet on the Paris Conservatoire and, at her mom’s urging, pursued modeling. By 14, she was on the quilt of Elle journal. She caught the attention of filmmaker Marc Allegret, who despatched his 20-year-old apprentice, Roger Vadim, to find her.
Vadim and Bardot started a years-long affair throughout which he cultivated the sex-kitten persona that may seduce the world. However Bardot wasn’t one to be cultivated. As Vadim as soon as stated, “She doesn’t act. She exists.”
Bardot married Vadim at 18, and that very same 12 months he directed her in “…And God Created Lady,” as a girl who falls in love together with her older husband’s youthful brother. The movie, which prompted ethical outrage within the U.S. and was closely edited earlier than it reached theaters, made Bardot a star and an emblem of French modernity.
“I wished to point out a traditional younger lady whose solely distinction was that she behaved in the way in which a boy would possibly, with none sense of guilt on an ethical or sexual stage,” Vadim stated on the time.
In actual life, Bardot left Vadim for her costar Jean-Louis Trintignant. She went on to grasp a comic-erotic persona within the fashionable 1957 comedy “Une Parisienne” and portrayed a younger delinquent within the 1958 drama “Love Is My Career.”
By 1959, she was pregnant with the kid of French actor Jacques Charrier, whom she married because of this. Collectively they’d a son, Nicolas.
In Bardot’s scathing 1996 memoir, “Initiales B.B: Mémoires,” she particulars her crude makes an attempt to abort the kid, asking medical doctors for morphine and punching herself within the abdomen. 9 months after the infant was born, she stated, she downed a bottle of sleeping capsules and slit her wrists, the primary of a number of obvious suicide makes an attempt throughout her life. When Bardot recovered, she gave up custody of her son and divorced Charrier.
“I couldn’t be Nicolas’ roots as a result of I used to be utterly uprooted, unbalanced, misplaced in that loopy world,” she defined years later.
Bardot earned her best box-office success within the 1960 noir drama “The Fact,” enjoying a girl on trial for the homicide of her lover. Her finest efficiency doubtless got here in Jean-Luc Godard’s acclaimed 1963 melancholy adaptation “Contempt,” as a spouse who falls out of affection together with her husband. She was later nominated for a BAFTA award for her efficiency as a circus entertainer turned political operative within the 1965 comedy “Viva Maria!”
All of the whereas, although, Bardot courted drama and lived giant.
Whereas she was married to German industrialist Gunter Sachs, she had an affair with French pop star Serge Gainsbourg. He wrote Bardot the erotic love track “Je t’aime … moi non plus,” which went on to change into successful by Donna Summer time, altered and retitled “Like to Love You Child.” By 1969, she had divorced Sachs and was romantically linked to everybody from Warren Beatty to Jimi Hendrix.
The superstar life ultimately exhausted Bardot, and he or she grew to concern that she’d find yourself dying younger like Marilyn Monroe or withering away in public view like Rita Hayworth. Although she exuded confidence, she admitted in her memoir that she battled despair as she sought to juggle the various transferring items of her chaotic life.
“Nearly all of nice actresses met tragic ends,” she advised the Guardian. “Once I stated goodbye to this job, to this lifetime of opulence and glitter, photos and adoration, the search to be desired, I used to be saving my life.”
Nearing 40, she stop performing and spent the remainder of her life bouncing between her Saint-Tropez seaside home and a farm — full with a chapel — exterior Paris. She devoted herself to the Brigitte Bardot Basis for the Welfare and Safety of Animals.
As an animal rights activist, her record of enemies was lengthy: the Japanese for searching whales, the Spanish for bullfighting, the Russians for killing seals, the furriers, hunters and circus operators.
At her house in Saint-Tropez, dozens of cats and canines — together with goats, sheep and a horse — wandered freely. She chased away fishermen and was sued for sterilizing a neighbor’s goat.
“My chickens are the happiest on this planet, as a result of I’ve been a vegetarian for the previous 20 years,” Bardot stated.
In 1985 she was awarded the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian ornament, however refused to gather it till President François Mitterrand agreed to shut the royal searching grounds.
In 1992 she married Bernard d’Ormale, a former aide to Jean-Marie Le Pen, chief of France’s far-right Nationwide Entrance and frequent candidate for France’s presidency. Later, Bardot grew to become an ardent supporter of Le Pen’s daughter Marine, chief of France’s anti-immigration far proper.
Two French civil rights teams sued Bardot for the xenophobic and homophobic feedback she made in her 2003 e book, “A Cry within the Silence,” wherein she rails in opposition to Muslims, gays, intellectuals, drug abusers, feminine politicians, unlawful immigrants and the “professionally” unemployed. She was finally fined six instances for inciting racial hatred, principally whereas talking out in opposition to Muslims and Jews. She was fined once more in 2021 over a 2019 rant whereby she dubbed the residents of Réunion, a French Island within the Indian Ocean, “degenerate savages.”
“I by no means had hassle saying what I’ve to say,” Bardot wrote in a 2010 letter to The Occasions. “As for being somewhat bunny that by no means says a phrase, that’s really the other of me.”
Bardot stirred controversy once more in 2018 when she dismissed the #MeToo motion as a marketing campaign fueled by a “hatred of males.”
“I assumed it was good to be advised that I used to be stunning or that I had a pleasant little ass,” she advised NBC. “This sort of praise is sweet.”
She remained agency in these views within the ultimate 12 months of her life, decrying the societal shaming of playwright-comedian-actor Nicolas Bedos and actor Gérard Depardieu, who have been each convicted of sexual assault. “Folks with expertise who seize a woman’s backside are thrown into the underside of the ditch,” she declared in a 2025 TV interview, her first in 11 years. “We may a minimum of allow them to keep it up dwelling.”
As she aged, Bardot principally saved to herself, content material to do the crossword puzzle when the newspaper arrived, are likely to her menagerie and mail off hotly written pleas to world leaders to halt their animal abuses. She was largely obscure when requested if she was nonetheless married to D’Ormale.
“It relies upon what day it’s,” she stated, laughing gently.
Piccalo is a former Occasions employees author. Former employees author Steve Marble contributed to this report.
