The Actress’ 7 Most Essential Films

Brigitte Bardot just died at 91, and it’s hard to imagine anything she would have liked less than a curated list of movie recommendations from her brief, inescapable film career. But to let the controversial French icon’s death go by as yet another moment of her quiet, confused erasure would be to knowingly repeat a mistake audiences have made with Bardot countless times before. Love her, hate her, or lust after her, cinema’s original and most contentious “cool girl” still deserves better.

When Bardot abruptly exited the film business at age 39, she was an international sex symbol and one of the most famous faces in the fashion industry. Her retirement, following 1973’s “The Edifying and Joyous Story of Colinot,” baffled audiences and was quietly rejected by the public imagination. In Hollywood, that denial was treated as permission to collapse the Bardot persona into a static set of visual signifiers, which were swiftly Americanized. The blond hair. The bangs. The (sometimes) bikini. Even as her filmography receded from view, Bardot saw her image endlessly copied and commodified. Her artistic essence was reduced to a repeatable French “look,” and the woman herself pivoted into animal activism.

The flattening of Bardot’s talent didn’t stop there. Instead, it intensified as the actress further rejected what made her famous, resulting in increasing strain with the art world over the last three decades. Born to wealthy parents in Paris, 1934, Bardot trained as a ballerina before becoming a model and actress as a teen. She appeared on the cover of “Elle” magazine as a fresh-faced brunette (yes, brunette!) and was soon recognized as an emblem of the jeune fille. That youthful, “clean girl” aesthetic rewired European style back then and laid the groundwork for the ’50s/’60s mod chic we’re still chasing in design today.

Bardot’s entrance onto the film scene was an act of romantic, rich-girl defiance, too, one that hinged on her turning 18. Traveling to auditions, Bardot rebelled against her parents by dating Roger Vadim, then a director’s assistant whom she met on a failed casting call. After reportedly threatening suicide during a brief forced separation from Vadim, Bardot convinced her parents to accept her future as an artist. The first of Bardot’s four husbands, Vadim eventually cast her as Juliette Hardy in 1956’s “And God Created Woman.” The filmmaker didn’t sexualize his star so much as relocate erotic agency into her hands, and Bardot changed the cinematic framing of physical desire as a result.

The character of Juliette Hardy was a feminine force driven by so-called “masculine” urges, and Bardot’s memorable portrayal — ethereal, emotionally detached, and energized rather than disgusted by the novelty of sex — had consequences that continue to ripple through film, gender, and politics today. Already successful but not yet seismic when she broke out 70 years ago, Bardot became a cultural symbol almost overnight. The international popularity of “And God Created Woman” allowed audiences around the globe to project a fantasy of European sexual freedom onto the real woman behind it, and Bardot’s private life soon became tabloid fodder throughout France, the United States, and beyond.

In the actress’ own writing (Bardot authored a memoir and several quasi-memoirs beginning in the 1990s), she reflected on a profound ambivalence toward feminism, fame, and family. She frequently described a sense of feeling wanted everywhere but belonging nowhere — free to be anyone but judged by everyone. An unattainable reflection of sexual mystique, Bardot is often compared to Marilyn Monroe, and she’s acknowledged that both were exploited as young women in Hollywood. But if Monroe was a tragedy mourned at the movies, Bardot actively rejected the language of victimhood. Her withdrawal from film was never fully forgiven by the fans who didn’t understand it, and you can view what followed as a deeply unlikable attempt to wrestle control of a mythic image far bigger than Bardot herself.

By the mid-1970s, Bardot had withdrawn from performing entirely, and she increasingly framed that alienation as a kind of moral clarity. In the process, the aging actress became mired in self-inflicted political controversy and was sharply criticized for her ultra-conservative, provocative talking points. Bardot was fined by the French government repeatedly for racist and hateful rhetoric. She later minimized sexual harassment during the height of the #MeToo movement, effectively aligning Bardot with a corner of discourse in stark contrast to the rebellious assertiveness she embodied on screen.

That trajectory has made it easier to dismiss Bardot rather than reckon with her contradictions. But what’s been lost in the repeated calls for her metaphorical dismissal is the degree to which Bardot’s acting presence forever changed our understanding of female autonomy. What’s more, we’ve missed her resistance to a tidy moral arc off-screen as an extension of that flawed legacy. At Bardot’s most famous, her work didn’t offer apology but friction-filled pleasure and unresolved playfulness. That tension is not incidental to her work. It is the work, and it deserves the layered reflection of any “serious” acting.

In the end, the woman synonymous with sexual liberation recoiled from global attention. The face that redefined desirability ultimately spent years fleeing visibility. That trajectory says as much about the culture that consumed Bardot as it does the icon herself, and revisiting these seven movies in the wake of her death isn’t an act of absolution or nostalgia. It’s an insistence on contending with women’s complexity, however uncomfortable, and letting their imperfections pierce through to become poetry.

Listed in chronological order, seven essential feature films of Brigitte Bardot.