<\/p>\n
Brigitte Bardot, the French actor idealized for her beauty and heralded in the midcentury as the prototype of liberated female sexuality, has died at 91.<\/p>\n
Long withdrawn from the entertainment industry, Bardot died at her home in southern France, Bruno Jacquelin of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals confirmed to the Associated Press. He gave no cause of death. Bardot had dealt with infirm health in recent years, including hospitalization for a breathing issue in July 2023<\/a> and additional hospital stays in 2025.<\/p>\n Bardot was known for being mercurial, self-destructive and prone to reckless love affairs with men and women. She was a fashion icon and media darling who left acting at 39 and lived out the rest of her years in near seclusion, emerging periodically to champion animal rights, lecture about moral decay and espouse bigoted political views.<\/p>\n And, as if in protest of her famed beauty, Bardot happily allowed herself to age naturally.<\/p>\n \u201cWith me, life is made up only of the best and the worst, of love and hate,\u201d she told the Guardian in 1996. \u201cEverything that happened to me was excessive.\u201d<\/p>\n In her prime, Bardot was considered a national treasure in France, received by President Charles de Gaulle at the \u00c9lys\u00e9e Palace and analyzed exhaustively by existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. She was the girl whose poster adorned the bedroom of a teenage John Lennon.<\/p>\n While Marilyn Monroe was playing it coy, Bardot was forthright and free about her sexuality, sleeping with her leading men without apology, sweaty and writhing barefoot on a table in the controversial 1956 film \u201c…And God Created Woman.\u201d Though her films were largely forgettable, she projected a radical sense of self-empowerment for women that had a lasting cultural influence.<\/p>\n Born Sept. 28, 1934, in Paris, the daughter of a Parisian factory owner and his socialite wife, Bardot and her younger sister were raised in a religious Catholic home.<\/p>\n Bardot studied ballet at the Paris Conservatoire and, at her mother\u2019s urging, pursued modeling. By 14, she was on the cover of Elle magazine. She caught the eye of filmmaker Marc Allegret, who sent his 20-year-old apprentice, Roger Vadim, to locate her.<\/p>\n Vadim and Bardot began a years-long affair during which he cultivated the sex-kitten persona that would seduce the world. But Bardot wasn\u2019t one to be cultivated. As Vadim once said, \u201cShe doesn\u2019t act. She exists.\u201d<\/p>\n Bardot married Vadim at 18 and that same year he directed her in \u201c…And God Created Woman,\u201d <\/a>as a woman who falls in love with her older husband\u2019s younger brother. The film, which prompted moral outrage in the U.S. and was heavily edited before it reached theaters, made Bardot a star and an emblem of French modernity.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to show a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved in the way a boy might, without any sense of guilt on a moral or sexual level,\u201d Vadim said at the time.<\/p>\n In real life, Bardot left Vadim for her costar Jean-Louis Trintignant. She went on to master a comic-erotic persona in the popular 1957 comedy \u201cUne Parisienne\u201d and portrayed a young delinquent in the 1958 drama \u201cLove Is My Profession.\u201d<\/p>\n By 1959, she was pregnant with the child of French actor Jacques Charrier, whom she married as a result. Together they had a son, Nicolas.<\/p>\n In Bardot\u2019s scathing 1996 memoir, \u201cInitiales B.B: M\u00e9moires,\u201d she details her crude attempts to abort the child, asking doctors for morphine and punching herself in the stomach. Nine months after the baby was born, she said, she downed a bottle of sleeping pills and slit her wrists, the first of several apparent suicide attempts during her life. When Bardot recovered, she gave up custody of her son and divorced Charrier.<\/p>\n \u201cI couldn\u2019t be Nicolas\u2019 roots because I was completely uprooted, unbalanced, lost in that crazy world,\u201d she explained years later.<\/p>\n Bardot earned her greatest box-office success in the 1960 noir drama \u201cThe Truth,\u201d playing a woman on trial for the murder of her lover. Her best performance likely came in Jean-Luc Godard\u2019<\/a>s 1963 melancholy adaptation \u201cContempt,\u201d as a wife who falls out of love with her husband. She was later nominated for a BAFTA award for her performance as a circus entertainer turned political operative in the 1965 comedy \u201cViva Maria!\u201d<\/p>\n All the while, though, Bardot courted drama and lived large. <\/p>\n While she was married to German industrialist Gunter Sachs, she had an affair with French pop star Serge Gainsbourg<\/a>. He wrote Bardot the erotic love song \u201cJe t\u2019aime \u2026 moi non plus,\u201d which went on to become a hit by Donna Summer, altered and retitled \u201cLove to Love You Baby.\u201d By 1969, she had divorced Sachs and was romantically linked to everyone from Warren Beatty to Jimi Hendrix<\/a>.<\/p>\n The celebrity life eventually exhausted Bardot and she grew to fear that she\u2019d end up dying young like Marilyn Monroe<\/a> or withering away in public view like Rita Hayworth<\/a>. Though she exuded confidence, she admitted in her memoir that she battled depression as she sought to juggle the many moving pieces of her chaotic life.<\/p>\n \u201cThe majority of great actresses met tragic ends,\u201d she told the Guardian. \u201cWhen I said goodbye to this job, to this life of opulence and glitter, images and adoration, the quest to be desired, I was saving my life.\u201d<\/p>\n Nearing 40, she quit acting and spent the rest of her life bouncing between her Saint-Tropez beach house and a farm \u2014 complete with a chapel \u2014 outside Paris. She devoted herself to the Brigitte Bardot Foundation<\/a> for the Welfare and Protection of Animals.<\/p>\n As an animal rights activist, her list of enemies was long: the Japanese for hunting whales, the Spanish for bullfighting, the Russians for killing seals, the furriers, hunters and circus operators.<\/p>\n At her home in Saint-Tropez, dozens of cats and dogs \u2014 along with goats, sheep and a horse \u2014 wandered freely. She chased away fishermen and was sued for sterilizing a neighbor\u2019s goat.<\/p>\n \u201cMy chickens are the happiest in the world, because I have been a vegetarian for the past 20 years,\u201d Bardot said.<\/p>\n In 1985 she was awarded the Legion d\u2019Honneur, France\u2019s highest civilian decoration, but refused to collect it until President Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand agreed to close the royal hunting grounds.<\/p>\n In 1992 she married Bernard d\u2019Ormale, a former aide to Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France\u2019s far-right National Front and frequent candidate for France\u2019s presidency. Later, Bardot became an ardent supporter of Le Pen\u2019s daughter Marine<\/a>, leader of France\u2019s anti-immigration far right.<\/p>\n Two French civil rights groups sued Bardot for the xenophobic and homophobic comments<\/a> she made in her 2003 book \u201cA Cry in the Silence,\u201d in which she rails against Muslims, gays, intellectuals, drug abusers, female politicians, illegal immigrants and the \u201cprofessionally\u201d unemployed. She was ultimately fined six times for inciting racial hatred, mostly while speaking out against Muslims and Jews. She was fined again in 2021<\/a> over a 2019 rant wherein she dubbed the residents of R\u00e9union, a French Island in the Indian Ocean, \u201cdegenerate savages.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cI never had trouble saying what I have to say,\u201d Bardot wrote in a 2010 letter to The Times<\/a>. \u201cAs for being a little bunny that never says a word, that is truly the opposite of me.\u201d<\/p>\n Bardot stirred controversy again in 2018 when she dismissed the #MeToo movement as a campaign fueled by a \u201chatred of men.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cI thought it was nice to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass,\u201d she told NBC. \u201cThis kind of compliment is nice.\u201d<\/p>\n