Brigitte Bardot, the enchanting French starlet with the marvelous pout who became a carefree icon of sexuality in the 1950s and ’60s after her liberated performance in the scandalous And God Created Woman, has died. She was 91.
Bardot died Sunday at her home in southern France, according to a representative from animal protection charity The Brigitte Bardot Foundation, who confirmed her death to The Associated Press. No cause or time of death was specified. She was reportedly hospitalized in November.
French President Emmanuel Macron was among the immediate mourners, calling Bardot “a legend of the century.” He said on social media: “Her films, her voice, her dazzling glory, her initials, her sorrows, her generous passion for animals, her face that became Marianne, Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom. French existence, universal brilliance. She touched us. We mourn a legend of the century.”
Bardot was one of the most famous French actresses of her time, celebrated for her beauty and fiery performances in films like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Truth (1960) and Jean-Luc Godard‘s Contempt (1963).
With an 18-inch waist and long, tousled hair, Bardot was one of the first movie stars to appear au naturel. She popularized the bikini in an era of one-piece modesty and made a habit of bedazzling photographers at the Cannes Film Festival.
And on Playboy‘s list of the “100 Sexiest Stars of the Century,” published in 1999, she placed fourth, trailing only Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Raquel Welch.
Bardot also recorded three breathy solo albums in the ’60s, singing “as if she was on the verge of bursting out into knowing giggles,” one reviewer wrote.
At the time of its release in staid 1956, And God Created Woman, directed by Roger Vadim — the first of her four husbands — pushed the boundaries of sex on the big screen. It was banned by the Vatican, and French censors insisted on cuts before allowing it to be shown in theaters at home.
The film begins with Bardot, then 22 and playing a restless orphan living in Saint-Tropez, lying unclothed on her stomach. Three men fall under her spell during the film, which also includes scenes of her undressing and a scorching sequence that has her dancing barefoot and drunk to calypso music.
And God Created Woman had a major impact on the liberated screen romances of the next decade, including those made by the French New Wave. Wrote Francois Truffaut: “I thank Vadim for having made this young woman repeat, in front of the lens, everyday gestures — trivial gestures like playing with her sandal, or less trivial ones like, yes indeed, making love in broad daylight.”
And God Created Woman was pilloried by French critics but gathered support in the U.S. and Great Britain, where it became a sensation. Bardot became the face (and body) of cinema in her country, and Time magazine called her the “Countess of Come-Hither.”
Known by the acronym “B.B.” in her homeland, Bardot had her every movement tracked by paparazzi and her every liaison emblazoned on the covers of tabloids. When she tried to commit suicide in 1960 after her torrid affair with actor Sami Frey was discovered by her second husband, actor Jacques Charrier, scores of photographers flocked to the scene, blocking the road as an ambulance rushed a dying Bardot — who had slit her wrists — to a hospital in Nice.
“I can understand hunted animals because of the way I was treated,” Bardot once said. “What happened to me was inhuman.”
While shooting the 1973 sex comedy The Edifying and Joyous Story of Colinot, directed by Nina Companeez, she decided to give up acting. “Everything felt ridiculous, superfluous, absurd and useless,” she recalled in her 1996 autobiography, Initiales B.B.
Speaking to a journalist while on location, she announced: “I’m done with movies. It’s over — this film is the last one. I’m sick of it.” In her memoirs, she wrote, “It felt like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders.” She was 39.
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born in Paris on Sept. 28, 1934. The daughter of an engineer, she was raised in a cultured bourgeois household in the affluent 16th arrondissement and studied ballet at the Conservatoire de Paris. She was scouted by a family friend to model for Elle magazine, whose cover she graced in 1950 at age 15.
Director Marc Allegret, who had discovered actress Simone Simon, recruited her for the movies, and she made her film debut in 1952’s Le trou normand (Crazy for Love), helmed by Jean Boyer. She also starred as a lighthouse keeper’s daughter in Willy Rozier’s Pacific-set romance The Girl in the Bikini and wed Allegret’s assistant, Vadim, that year.
Bardot appeared with Kirk Douglas in Act of Love (1953), in Concert of Intrigue (1954) and in Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy (1956) before her career breakthrough in And God Created Woman, Vadim’s directorial debut.
During the making of the film, Bardot began an affair with co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant, and she and Vadim divorced in 1957. (Vadim would go on to marry Jane Fonda in 1965.)
Bardot’s turn as a woman on trial for murdering her lover (Frey) in The Truth — nominated for the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 1961 — remains one of her most memorable roles. The shoot with infamously difficult French auteur Clouzot, however, proved to be one of her most trying.
The director abused his star at every turn, slapping her across the face on several occasions (she once slapped him back) and stomping on her bare feet to solicit a reaction. For one scene, he gave Bardot sleeping pills while promising her they were only aspirin — resulting in a perfectly woozy performance that would knock the actress out for the next 48 hours.
Bardot would deliver another prized showing as Camille Javal, a capricious bathing beauty, in Godard’s masterpiece Contempt, largely based on the filmmaker’s life and breakup with actress Anna Karina. Also starring Jack Palance and Fritz Lang, the behind-the-scenes drama about the making of a movie begins with Bardot lying nude on a bed as her husband (Michel Piccoli) caresses and praises her body.
But Contempt is far from an exploitation film, and Bardot’s portrayal of a woman fleeing a tumultuous relationship with a screenwriter, only to land in the arms of an evil Hollywood producer, is one of the best in her career — this despite the fact she was neither Godard’s first nor second choice for the role.
“I don’t know what conditions the movie was made under, nor if Bardot and Godard even got along,” French critic Jean-Louis Bory wrote. “But the result is clear: There has rarely been such a profound understanding between an actress and a director.”
Although Contempt did reasonably well in theaters, the fact that Bardot — 28 at the time — was one of the highest-paid actors in France meant the film did not turn a major profit, even if it is now considered to be a New Wave classic and, arguably, Bardot’s best movie.
The actress was busy throughout the rest of the 1960s, headlining such diverse films as Please, Not Now! (1961) and Love on a Pillow (1962), both directed by ex-husband Vadim; A Very Private Affair (1962), the action comedy Viva Maria! (1965) and the segment “William Wilson” from the omnibus movie Spirits of the Dead (1968), all helmed by Louis Malle; and Edward Dmytryk’s forgotten Western, Shalako (1968), where she played a countess opposite Sean Connery.
In 1965, she appeared in the 20th Century Fox comedy Dear Brigitte, starring Jimmy Stewart.
As a singer, Bardot’s most significant vocal work was for the French crooner Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she performed duets on “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Je t’aime … mon non plus.”
While the former became a major hit, the latter was shelved when Bardot’s third husband, German playboy Gunther Sachs, heard its sexually explosive lyrics on the radio and threatened to sue. (Bardot and Gainsbourg were allegedly having an affair). The song was rerecorded with Jane Birkin and released to much fanfare, while Bardot’s version did not come out until 1986.
Bardot met Charrier on the set of Christian-Jacque’s Babette Goes to War (1959) and was married to the actor from 1959-62. She wed Sachs in Las Vegas in 1966 (to declare his love for her, he apparently had 10,000 roses dropped from a helicopter onto her Saint-Tropez estate), but they divorced in 1969.
Bardot’s fourth and final husband was French businessman and National Front adviser Bernard d’Ormale, whom she wed in 1992.
After making nearly 50 features, she dedicated her life to defending animal rights. Through her Fondation Brigitte Bardot, created in 1986, she took on such issues as seal hunting, poaching, the fur trade, bullfighting, the captivity of wild animals in zoos and circuses, conditions in slaughterhouses and the farming of horse meat.
“I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she said. “I am going to give my wisdom and experience, the best of me, to animals.”
Bardot supported National Front candidates including Catherine Megret and Marine Le Pen and spoke out against the “Islamisation” of France. A 1996 interview in Le Figaro had her condemned for inciting racial hatred, while a paragraph in her book comparing homosexuals and pedophiles was widely criticized.
And in 2018, she denounced the #MeToo movement. “I thought it was nice to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass,” she said.
Survivors include her son, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, born in 1960 and raised predominantly by his father. Bardot never had any other children and described her pregnancy as “a tumor that was eating away at me, that I was carrying in my tumefied flesh, awaiting the sacred moment when they would finally get rid of it.”
Her son would sue her in court for such propos, claiming they violated his “intrauterine intimacy.”
Emancipated from family ties and sexual mores, Bardot was never one to be held down by constraints, whether those of the film industry she fled or the many lovers she left behind. When asked in 2014 by the French tabloid Gala why she had always been so fiercely independent, she answered with a laugh, “I’m the man of my life!”
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.