There was, in the grim postwar years, no more potent symbol of imminent sexual revolution and potential emotional emancipation than Brigitte Bardot.
For once, that shopworn cliché “iconic” seems appropriate (indeed, unavoidable). The actor and model, who has died at the age of 91, had, in her breakthrough years, as significant an impact outside France as she had in her native country. Who else better communicated the romance, aloofness and – to those on the other side of La Manche – intellectual exoticness of contemporaneous France than the well-born Parisian?
Simone de Beauvoir celebrated her in a famous 1959 essay entitled Brigitte Bardot and The Lolita Syndrome. That intimidating intellectual felt the star of And God Created Woman and Babette Goes to War was “capable of incinerating the poor disguises that camouflage reality”. Very French. The rest of the world surely agreed when, in the 1960s, she was selected to officially represent Marianne, personification of the republic.
Her mainstream films have, perhaps, not survived so well as those by near contemporaries such as Jeanne Moreau or Catherine Deneuve. But, though in retirement from acting for over 50 years, during which time she devoted herself to animal welfare, Bardot’s celebrity scarcely dimmed. In later years, her right-wing political views led to controversy and caused her to be fined for “inciting racial hatred”.
Bardot was born in 1934 to a well-off, devout Catholic family. Her father was an engineer and factory owner. Her mother also came from money. When the constraints of the Nazi occupation were released, she took ballet classes and, still in her mid-teens, found work as a fashion model on prestigious magazines such as Elle.
Brigitte Bardot in a scene from the film The Bear and The Doll. Photograph: Keystone Press Agency/ZUMA Press Wire
At an audition for an acting role, she encountered the director Roger Vadim, with whom she began a relationship. Her parents were outraged, but, following an apparent suicide attempt by Bardot, they eventually relented, accepting the relationship as long as Vadim agreed to marry her when she turned 18.
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The director then set out to consciously manufacture a new star for a new age. The brunette became a blonde. He found roles for her as a love interest in films across Europe.
By 1955 she was flirting with Dirk Bogarde in the durable British comedy Doctor at Sea. She was among the first celebrities to pose in the then innovative bikini – named after the site of an atomic bomb test – and helped launch the tradition (now more or less extinct) of “starlets” being photographed provocatively on the beach at the Cannes Film Festival.
Proper professional attention came with her lead role on Vadim’s debut And God Created Woman from 1956. Here is where Bardot became the unofficial cultural ambassador for a certain version of France.
The film, following an uninhibited libertine as she moons about Saint-Tropez, was no sort of smash at home, but it became a sensation in the United States. Bardot was suddenly a hitherto unimaginable sort of movie star.
Comedians slipped her name into routines that required an avatar of exotic (and foreign) sexuality. Bob Dylan dedicated the first song he ever wrote to her. In the United Kingdom, just coming out of rationing, Bardot may as well have arrived from Venus. John Lennon and Paul McCartney plotted unsuccessfully to get her into a film with The Beatles.
Now the highest paid actress in France, Bardot found that privacy was impossible. A survey claimed that 47 per cent of all conversation in France was about the star (and only 41 per cent about politics). She left Vadim and married the actor Jacques Charrier with whom she had a son, Nicolas.
Strong films such as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Truth followed, but Bardot, also then a busy recording artist, worried she was being stereotyped in undemanding fare. “I have not had very much chance to act,” she complained. “Mostly I have had to undress.”
Brigitte Bardot at a London Hotel during a photocall after arriving in from Paris to start location shooting for her movie “Babette Goes to War”. Photograph: PA/PA Wire
The critic and director Peter Bogdanovich noted that And God Created Woman was responsible for “breaking French cinema out of US art houses and into the mainstream and … paving the way for the takeover in France of the New Wave filmmakers”. Bardot joined with Jean-Luc Godard, the most celebrated of that Nouvelle Vague, for his highly acclaimed Le Mépris in 1963, but, even there, she seemed to be inhabiting an emblematic ideal.
One can appreciate why she felt trapped and why she ended up retreating from acting before her 40th birthday. Greta Garbo, once as famous as Bardot later became, had done something similar, but the Swede slipped into enigmatic obscurity. Bardot, who had already campaigned successfully for more humane abattoir regulations, approached the rest of her life with a mission. In 1986 she established The Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She campaigned against bullfighting, animal testing and battery farming.
French actor Brigitte Bardot who has died at the age of 91. Photograph: PA
Later memoirs were breathtakingly frank about lovers, family and colleagues. Her son Nicolas, whom she didn’t see for decades after divorcing Charrier, sued her for noting, in one volume, that she would have preferred giving “birth to a little dog”.
In 1992, she married Bernard d’Ormale, an adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the right-wing National Front party, and went on to endorse Le Pen’s run for the presidency. Criticism of her extreme positions did not shake her determination one iota.
“I don’t care about looking conservative and awkward,” she said in 2012. “I’m only looking to assuage my soul and protect the animals.”
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