Brigitte Bardot, legendary French film star and original ‘sex kitten’

Brigitte Bardot, the French film goddess who has died aged 91, was the original “sex kitten”, celebrated for her piquant air of Lolita-ish sensuality which heralded a new era of permissiveness in the cinema, and created a cult of imitators around the world.

It did not matter that the 46 films she made ranged, as a rule, from the mediocre to the forgettable. Provocative, rebellious, heedless of convention, she captured the free-living spirit of the time, and defined an image, the “Bardot look” – tumbled blonde hair; petulant pout; and gamine, bikini hips – which nourished countless male pin-up fantasies.

Her following was greatest in France, where young girls slavishly copied her style, leading her to complain of being “fed up with seeing Bardots all over the place”. She was also frequently mobbed in Britain and America. During the filming of Adorable Idiot, at Hampstead in north London, the director was obliged to pack up and go home, for fear that his leading lady would be crushed to death under the squall of peroxided screamers.

“We should be as proud of ‘BB’,” one Paris editor wrote, “as of Roquefort cheese and the wine of Bordeaux.”

In fact, though, Brigitte Bardot was rarely allowed to demonstrate her fair talent as an actress. Her role was always the same – the perpetual adolescent frolicking in varying degrees of undress on bed or beach, sulkily insouciant of the effect she was having on whichever lovelorn (and Humbertish) male was at hand.

Even her more arresting films – And God Created Woman (1956), Babette Goes to War (1959), La Vérité (1960), Le Mépris (1963), Vive Maria! (1965) – were little more than vehicles for her erotic potential. Fragile and insecure, she spent most of her life feeling suicidal.

The “Bardot” myth was largely the work of Roger Vadim, the execrably suave film producer, who never missed an opportunity to relate the tale of his “discovery” of the young Brigitte as a teenage lycéenne in the South of France.

It was Vadim who, mindful that mere sexual allure was no guarantee of international stardom, billed her not just as a film actress, but as a symbol of the Swinging Sixties, a barometer of the changing mood of the times. The idea caught on, and soon serious French penseurs were describing Brigitte Bardot as “not so much a girl, as an exciting philosophical attitude”.

But the sociological honeymoon could not last forever. As The Daily Telegraph was moved to lament in 1963: “What at first looked like a genuine protest against prudery – a movement, almost, against the more repressive forms of puritanism – soon rounded out into box-office contours.”

Brigitte Bardot herself did little to further her cause as a social radical. When asked whether her emancipated behaviour was intended to be of the feminist sort, she retorted: “Absolutely not. Though men can be beasts, women’s lib is idiotic.”

Indeed she conceded little at all to the demands of public opinion. She reserved a bolshie contempt for Hollywood (never once accepting an offer to act there), and cared even less for the lofty opinions of the French intelligentsia or the Catholic Church, which was wont to attack her for presenting an injurious example to the nation’s youth.

As she gained in experience and years, Brigitte Bardot seemed to become less and less tolerant of the glittering world she inhabited. An amusing talker when in the mood, she described herself as “cleverly silly”. More often than not, though, she affected the kind of nonchalant melancholy often taken in stars to be a mark of intelligent self-awareness – or at least a healthy attitude towards the tawdry showbiz merry-go-round.

Bardot proved the queen of such capricious boudeur, prone to muttering about her spiritual home being “a leetle ’ut by the sea”, far away from the gilded splendour of the world’s best hotels.

Her supporters and detractors alike would talk of Brigitte Bardot as the little girl who never grew up. And there was indeed a vulnerable immaturity in her approach to life. Though cosseted by a string of rich older men, she saved money zealously, declaring: “Bardolatry is a cult that may not last.”

She had simple personal habits, with only a small wardrobe; and said she possessed no watch because she did not want to know the time. Her one luxury was a vintage white Rolls-Royce, steered by a handsome black chauffeur.

Her romantic life was rather more extravagant, but no more fulfilling – an unhappy series of quick takes and slow, painfully public dissolves. In 1966 she made a typically blasé reference to this dismaying syndrome when, on her return from her third marriage to Gunther Sachs, she told a reporter: “The honeymoon was marvellous, but I don’t mind going back to work. It’s good to have a change – honeymoon, work, honeymoon, work. . .”

She said she needed love affairs to supply the confidence she lacked. And this became an ever more pressing theme as she moved into her mid-thirties, when the once divinely beautiful face began show signs of strain.

Brigitte Bardot grew, à la Monroe, into an increasingly troubled woman, distrustful and vulnerable to the wrong sort of attentions, unable to reconcile herself to the ephemeral and essentially artificial nature of her achievement.

In 1973, at the age of 39, she suddenly announced she was retiring from the screen, and turning her attention to her soul – or rather, the animal kingdom.

“I gave my youth and my beauty to men,” she remarked ominously, “now I’m giving my wisdom and experience to animals.”

In the early 1980s she retired to a villa La Madrague at St Tropez on the Riviera, which she eventually shared with 60 cats, 14 dogs, a herd of goats, sundry sheep, a donkey, and a cow she had saved from the local abattoir.

Thereafter she emerged only occasionally, under cover of a cowboy hat, to embark on the campaign trail – demonstrating against the culling of seals, or the illegal massacre of turtle doves in the Gironde region; protesting against “that bloody operetta”, bullfighting; or fulminating against feline discrimination after a magazine reported that 30 per cent of cats in France were infected with Aids.

She became increasingly misanthropic – “I detest humanity, I’m allergic to it” – and, having alienated the movie world, also began to fall foul of her neighbours in St Tropez.

After the local mayor banned dogs from the beach, the former pioneer of free love complained that the resort had been taken over by “vice, money, homosexuality and exhibitionists”. The mayor reposted that Miss Bardot was “losing her head”.

That same year she became embroiled in another local scandal, when a neighbour left his donkey, Charley, in her care during a trip abroad, only to return and find that she had paid a veterinary surgeon to castrate the animal “for its own good”.

After a long court case she was cleared of the charges brought against her, but the seriousness of her cause had taken a knock.

For Brigitte Bardot herself, the gloom was punctuated only by suicide attempts, and the odd ill-advised love affair – in spite of her repeated insistence that, since discovering animals, “the last thing I need is a man about the place”.

In 1992 she caused a stir when she exchanged “symbolic” marriage vows with M Bernard d’Ornale, a leading member of the extreme Right in France, whom she described as “intelligent, straight, romantic, sensitive”, with the “character of a pig”.

Finally, in 1990, Brigitte Bardot sealed her break with the past, announcing (as if anyone had doubted it) that she would never, ever act again: “For me the cinema is linked with such a circus in my life that I don’t want to ever hear it talked about.”

She also publicly disavowed all her films, with the exception of La Verité. Only Henri Clouzot, she went on, had succeeded in turning her, albeit briefly, from a sex symbol into a real actress in that film, which featured a crime passionnel and a suicide. “Clouzot harassed me and cut me up in every possible imaginable way. But I understood it was for the film, and not just stupid sadism.”

It was a sad, muted finale to a career which had, in reality, already ended many years before.

Brigitte Bardot was born at Passy, in Paris, on September 28 1934, the daughter of Louis Bardot, a rich industrialist who manufactured liquid gas and acetylene. Her mother had studied dancing and acting in Milan.

Brigitte and her younger sister were brought up in an atmosphere of aloof luxury. After early schooling from a governess, she attended an exclusive private school and went on to take dancing lessons from a member of the Paris Opera Ballet and then at the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse.

As a schoolgirl she was rather plain, and professed to have developed a permanent fear of looking ugly. But in adolescence she blossomed, and at 15 was propelled into a teenage modelling career after posing as a mannequin dancer in a dress shop that her mother opened.

A shot of her on the cover of Elle appealed to Marc Allegret, a film producer, who sent his young Franco-Russian assistant, Roger Vadim (aka Vladimir Plemiannikov) to suggest a film test. He and Brigitte duly fell in love, and when her father opposed their marriage, she made the first of many suicide attempts.

In 1952 they married, and after studying acting under René Simon, BB made her film debut in Crazy for Love. At 18 she gained the leading role in The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter, and over the next three years landed several small parts in films such as The Son of Caroline Chérie and Helen of Troy.

An unexpected boost came in 1954, when on a visit to the Cannes Film Festival she attracted all the photographers away from the leads. The next year she went to London to give a fair performance opposite Dirk Bogarde in the comedy Doctor at Sea; and then, after a secondary role in René Clair’s Les Grandes Manoeuvres (1955), she was “a virtuoso of decolletage” in The Light Across the Street (1955).

By now firmly nailed to Vadim’s mast, she made a quick succession of films – Cette Sacrée Gamine, Nero’s Weekend and Mam’selle Striptease! – before going to the Riviera in the summer of 1956 to star in his erotic sensation And Woman Was Created.

This film, little more than an excuse for his young starlet to strip off on St Tropez beach, told of an 18-year-old who finds herself fatally attracted towards men. It ran into a few censorship difficulties, but was otherwise gratefully received by audiences throughout France, Britain and America.

Over the next few years her most significant films included Une Parisienne (1957), with Charles Boyer and Henri Vidal, about a French minister’s daughter and a visiting royal consort; In Case of Adversity, in which she was cast as a prostitute; and Babette Goes to War (1959), an amusing romp about a Free French heroine pitched against the Nazis, for which she practised her parachuting at the RAF station at Abingdon. The other star was Jacques Charrier, who became her second husband, and with whom she had a son.

La Vérité, which sought the truth about passion and misery in the Latin Quarter, gave her, at 26, an unexpected chance to convey some of her acting ability – she gained a European grand prix for her intriguing beatnik performance. The film’s production was held up, however, by another suicide attempt.

Please Not Now!, in 1962, was a trivial story about cover girls and lecherous photographers. And the next year came Le Mépris, a welter of destructive passion, directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Viva Maria!, by contrast, filmed in Mexico in 1965, with Jeanne Moreau as co-star, was about a couple of soubrettes who ended up leading a revolution in Central America.

In 1968 Brigitte Bardot made what would prove to be one of her best films, Shalako (1968), a story of aristocrats on safari, cowboys and Indians in the 1880s, filmed in Spain, with Sean Connery.

A string of less enthralling items ensued – The Bear and the Doll (1970), The Novices, a tale of a nun who becomes a prostitute, and Les Pétroleuses, a dismal rendering of Mexican oil rivalry, co-starring Claudia Cardinale.

Don Juan 73, another of Vadim’s ideas, about a modern femme fatale, was considered trendy and tedious. That year, she made her last film, The Joyous Story of Colinot, a most inauspicious Middle Ages comedy with Laurent Vergez.

And so began the long journey into the wilderness, as Brigitte Bardot laboured to cut out the past and recast herself in a more acceptable image. It was not long before the role of the benevolent celebrity, too, began to pall, however. By gradually auctioning off the huge collection of jewels she had been given over the years, she saved enough money to realise her dream of setting up a Brigitte Bardot Foundation devoted to the welfare of animals – though this was soon dismantled.

After an initial burst of enthusiasm for the campaign trail, she went on fewer and fewer trips abroad, preferring to pronounce from the privacy of her own homes (besides the St Tropez villa, she owned a flat in Paris, an alpine chalet and a smattering of farm houses).

Old friends were not exempt from the animal duties – Marlon Brando once called on Brigitte Bardot at her villa, only to be roped into one of her regular sorties into the back streets of the town in search of abandoned pets.

In truth, though, fewer and fewer of her friends seemed inclined to visit, apparently put off by the prospect of the hostess’s menagerie of dogs, cats and goats, which roamed at liberty, ate at her table and slept on her bed.

And woe betide any acquaintance who fell foul of her laws. After Alain Delon, whom she had known for nearly 25 years, appeared on a television commercial advertising fur coats, she spat on his memory, and pledged never to forgive him.

Nor did she ever let Valéry Giscard d’Estaing forget the evil of his attachment to hunting. Their relationship dated back to the days of the 1974 election campaign, when she had slithered around St Tropez wearing a Giscard-emblazoned T-shirt.

In 1983 she again tried to kill herself when her long-term boyfriend, Allain Bougrain, the television journalist, walked out. He was soon replaced, with Denis, an actor 16 years her junior.

Motherhood provided no greater security or happiness. For all her obsessive love of animals, she seemed brutally indifferent to her only child, the son she had borne Charrier. When they divorced in 1963, Brigitte Bardot, declaring herself too immature to bring up a child, gave custody of Nicholas to his father – she later claimed that it was the boy himself who had done the abandoning.

“Nicholas hasn’t wanted anything to do with me for years,” she explained. “He hides himself away somewhere in Scandinavia.” In 1992, though, after more than 10 years’ silence, mother and son were reunited.

Latterly, as her long, stringy hair hung in ever more languid loops about her face and the eyes took on a wild, staring fearfulness, Brigitte Bardot began to bear an increasing resemblance to the scores of creatures on whom she doted. Her concern for humanity, meanwhile, fell further and further behind the standard of the times. Her many “open letters” earned her, in total, six convictions for inciting racial hatred.

In 1999, she lamented the “invasion” of her homeland by “an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims”, a crusade she continued throughout the 2000s, despite frequent fines. Her 2003 book Un cri dans le silence attacked, in addition to Muslims, gays, the unemployed, illegal immigrants and teachers, and called for a return of the guillotine. Her final conviction came in 2021, for calling the Hindu Tamils of Réunion, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, “degenerate savages”.

Her eccentricities were, as a rule, not widely noticed outside France until 2018, when she dismissed the actresses coming forward with #MeToo allegations as “hypocritical, ridiculous, and without interest... lots of actresses will try to play the tease with producers to get a role and then they say they were harassed”. She ended her life as a recluse.

Brigitte Bardot was divorced from Roger Vadim in 1957 and married Jacques Charrier, the film actor, in 1959. After a divorce in 1963 she married Gunter Sachs, the German millionaire in 1966, and was divorced in 1969. In 1992, she married Bernard d’Ormale, a former adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Front National. He survives her, along with her son.

Brigitte Bardot, born September 28 1934, died December 28 2025

[Source: Daily Telegraph]