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For nearly two decades she was the most celebrated object of desire in cinema. For longer than that, half a century or more, Brigitte Bardot, who has died at 91, was the darling and demon, by turn, of the world’s gossip pages.
From the impact of her first major role in husband and director Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1956) to her retirement from acting in 1973, Bardot’s bodily curves and baby-faced beauty, topped off by the famous “choucroute” hairstyle (a blonde beehive with cataracting curls), made her an international sex symbol. After the end of her film career she created media furores and inspired newspaper headlines, partly as an outspoken advocate of rightwing Front National politics, and partly as an animal welfare champion who once called the US’s hunting, shooting and electioneering vice-presidency candidate Sarah Palin “a disgrace to women”.
At the early height of her fame, Bardot was admired and honoured in France. President Charles de Gaulle declared that her contribution to French exports was equal to Renault’s. From 1969 to 1972 she was the model for Marianne, symbol of French liberty and the republic. In 1985 she was awarded the Legion of Honour.
With Michel Piccoli in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Contempt’ (‘Le Mépris’), 1963 © Getty Images
Both in France and beyond she inspired debate over the role of women and of sex appeal in gender politics. Simone de Beauvoir and Françoise Sagan both wrote book-length essays on Bardot. The first, The Lolita Syndrome, called her “the locomotive of women’s history”. The global reach of her celebrity — extending to Hollywood, where she made the Western Shalako (1968) with Sean Connery — inspired two films commenting directly on the phenomenon of pop-culture fame: Louis Malle’s Vie Privée (A Very Private Affair, 1962) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963).
Born in Paris on September 28 1934, Bardot grew up in a middle-class Roman Catholic family. Her father was an industrialist whose family business manufactured liquid air and acetylene. Her mother enrolled Brigitte as a child in dance classes. In 1947 she joined the National Superior Conservatory for Music and Dance. In her teens Brigitte began modelling for fashion magazines. Her image on the cover of Elle drew the attention of filmmaker Roger Vadim. In 1952, the year in which she made her movie debut in Jean Boyer’s Le Trou Normand, Vadim and Bardot married.
Attention-catching supporting roles, including nubile appearances in British comedy Doctor at Sea (1955) and as the heroine’s handmaid in the Euro-Hollywood epic Helen of Troy (1956), led to the role that launched her own fleet of fans. In And God Created Woman Vadim cast her as a small-town teenage misfit, liberating Bardot’s sex appeal and her willingness to display it. Raunchy imagery was picked out for the poster and preview trailers. The religious and censorship lobbies rose up in arms, especially in America.
By 1957, Bardot was romancing the film’s star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, earning the actress her first gossip-column notices as a siren and potential homewrecker (Trintingant was married). She divorced Vadim that year. Two years later, she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she had her only child (Nicolas-Jacques, born 1960).
At a reception in Rome, 1963 © Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
By the 1960s, the Bardot phenomenon had become a virtual Bardot industry. As an actress she attracted top directors (Malle, Godard and Henri-Georges Clouzot, for whom she made another controversy-stirring film, La Vérité, in 1960) and top co-stars (Alain Delon, Jean Gabin, Jeanne Moreau). As a singer she recorded albums. In 1967, with her then lover Serge Gainsbourg she sang the first recorded — but at her request unreleased — version of the heavy-breathing “Je t’aime . . . moi non plus”. It was finally made available in 1986.
Bardot seldom spoke admiringly of her screen career: “I started out as a lousy actress and have remained one.” The conviction she sometimes failed to bring to film performances she brought to subsequent roles and missions. She campaigned for animal wellbeing, establishing the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals in 1986. (In 1987 she raised half a million dollars for the Foundation by auctioning her jewels.) A vegetarian, she inveighed against cruel or needless (in her view) slaughter. Her targets included seal-culling, the horsemeat trade and the Muslim tradition of cutting animal’s throats without stunning or anaesthetising. She wrote protest letters about animal cruelty to world leaders, including China’s Jiang Zemin and Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II.
At a protest against seal-hunting in 1976 © AFP/Getty Images
Even more controversial were Bardot’s political opinions. Her last husband, after a three-year marriage to the German playboy millionaire Gunter Sachs (1966-69), was Bernard d’Ormale, a one-time adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, former leader of France’s Front National party. Bardot went to print, more than once, to excoriate her country’s immigration policy, especially its tolerance of Muslims. She was fined several times by courts for her xenophobic comments, including anti-Islamic statements.
It was a prodigious life and an enduringly provocative one. The early Bardot was a self-willed, independent-minded woman, more influential than any other single screen star in inaugurating the age of sexual liberation. The older Bardot showed, whatever the acceptability or unacceptability of her views, that a woman could be listened to: the reward not just of celebrity but also of the strength of ego and self-belief that made that celebrity possible.
