Brigitte Bardot 1934-2025
French legend who turned her back on film dies aged 91
29 Dec 2025 - The Guardian
Andrew Pulver, Angelique Chrisafis
Paris - Brigitte Bardot, the French actor and singer who became an international sex symbol before turning her back on the film industry and embracing animal rights activism and far-right politics, has died aged 91.
Paying tribute yesterday, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, wrote on social media that his country was mourning “a legend of the century”.
“Her films, her voice, her dazzling glory … her sorrows, her generous passion for animals, her face that became Marianne, Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom,” he said.
Bardot died at her St-Tropez home, La Madrague, according to the animal protection charity she set up in 1986. It said: “The Brigitte Bardot Foundation announces with immense sadness the death of its founder and president, Madame Brigitte Bardot, a world-renowned actress and singer, who chose to abandon her prestigious career to dedicate her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation.”
Her cause of death was not made public. Bardot was briefly kept in hospital in October for what her office called a “minor” procedure.
The town hall in St-Tropez, where Bardot had taken holidays as a child and where she later shot the film And God Created Woman, said the actor had “helped make St-Tropez shine across the world”.
The town on the French Riviera said Bardot was its “most radiant ambassador” and part of “the collective memory of St-Tropez, which we must preserve”.
Bardot won global fame in 1956 with And God Created Woman, which was written and directed by her then husband, Roger Vadim. For the next two decades, she was said to have embodied the idea of the archetypal “sex kitten”.
In the early 1970s, however, she announced her retirement from acting and became an outspoken campaigner on animal rights, and increasingly active on the far right.
Bardot’s incendiary comments about ethnic minorities, immigration, Islam and homosexuality resulted in a string of convictions for inciting racial hatred.
French courts fined her six times between 1997 and 2008 for her comments, particularly those targeting the Muslim community.
In one case, a Paris court fined her €15,000 (£13,000) for describing Muslims as “this population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts”.
Jordan Bardella, the president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, which Bardot supported, wrote: “Brigitte Bardot was a woman of heart, conviction and character. An ardent patriot, devoted to animals that she protected throughout her life, she embodied a whole French era, but also above all a certain idea of courage and freedom.”
Le Pen, who Bardot once described as “the Joan of Arc of the 21st century”, wrote on social media that Bardot was “exceptional for her talent, courage, frankness and beauty”.
“She was incredibly French,” Le Pen added. “Free, indomitable, whole. She will be hugely missed.”
Such was Bardot’s role in the far right’s cultural pantheon that tributes were also paid to her from Italy’s government, where the deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, called her “a timeless star, but above all a woman who was free, nonconformist, protagonist of courageous battles in defence of our traditions”.
The culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, said: “Brigitte Bardot was not only one of the great protagonists of world cinema, but also an extraordinary interpreter of western fundamental freedoms.”
He said she “resolutely defended her vision of cultural and social values and civic engagement”.
Born in 1934 in Paris, Bardot grew up in a prosperous and traditional Catholic family and excelled enough as a dancer to be allowed to study ballet, gaining a place at the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris.
At the same time she found work as a model, appearing on the cover of Elle in 1950 while only 15. As a result of her modelling work, she was offered film roles; at one audition she met Vadim, who she would marry in 1952, after she turned 18.
Bardot was cast in small roles, with increasing prominence, playing Dirk Bogarde’s love interest in Doctor at Sea, a big hit in the UK in 1955. But it was Vadim’s And God Created Woman, in which Bardot played an uninhibited teenager in St-Tropez, that consolidated her image and turned her into an international icon.
The film was a huge hit in France, as well as internationally, and catapulted Bardot into the front rank of French screen performers.
She swiftly became an inspiration for intellectuals and artists, not least the young John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who demanded their then girlfriends dye their hair blond in imitation of her. The columnist Raymond Cartier wrote a lengthy article about “le cas Bardot” in Paris Match in 1958, while Simone de Beauvoir published her famous essay Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome in 1959, framing the actor as France’s most liberated woman.
In 1969, Bardot was chosen as the first real-life model for Marianne, the symbol of the French republic.
In the early 1960s, she appeared in a string of high-profile French films, including Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Oscar-nominated drama The Truth, Louis Malle’s A Very Private Affair (opposite Marcello Mastroianni) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt.
Bardot also had a music career, which included recording the original version of Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus, which he wrote for her while they were having an extramarital affair.
Bardot found the pressure of stardom increasingly irksome, telling the Guardian in 1996: “The madness which surrounded me always seemed unreal. I was never really prepared for the life of a star.” She retired from acting in 1973, aged 39, after making the historical romance The Edifying and Joyous Story of Colinot.
Her focus became animal welfare activism, joining protests against seal hunts and establishing her charity.
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Screen siren charmed the globe
29 Dec 2025 - The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
Bardot … there was a time when it couldn’t be pronounced without a knowing pout on the second syllable. French headline-writers loved calling the world’s most desirable film star by her initials: “BB”, that is, bébé,a bit of weirdly infantilised tabloid pillow-talk.
When Brigitte Bardot retired from the movies in the mid-70s, taking up the cause of animal rights and a ban on the import of baby seals, the French press took to calling her BB-phoque, a homophone of the French for “baby seal” with a nasty hint of an Anglo pun.
But France’s love affair with Bardot was to curdle, despite her fierce patriotism and admiration for Charles de Gaulle. (The feeling was reciprocated.) As her animal rights campaigning morphed in the 21st century into an attack on halal meat, and then into shrill attacks on the alleged “Islamicisation” of France, her relations with the modern world curdled even more.
In the 1950s, before the sexual revolution, before the New Wave, before feminism, there was Bardot: she was sex, she was youth, and, more to the point, Bardot was modernity. She was the zeitgeist force that stirred cinema’s young lions such as François Truffaut against the old order.
Bardot was the country’s most sensational cultural export; she was in effect the French Beatles, a liberated, deliciously shameless screen siren who made male American moviegoers gulp and goggle with desire in that puritan land where sex on screen was still not commonplace, and in which sexiness had to be presented in a demure solvent of comedy. Bardot may not have had the comedy skills of a Marilyn Monroe, but she had ingenuous charm and real charisma, a gentleness and sweetness, largely overlooked in the avalanche of prurience and sexist condescension.
She drove a hungry media industry as a supposed man-eater, whose lovers and ex-husbands obligingly brawled over her in the Paris streets in front of press photographers. But Bardot was driven half- or three-quarters mad with the relentless intrusion. She was a public figure whose image was consumed not only through movies but magazine covers, paparazzi shots and gloating press stories. Perhaps only Jennifer Aniston, in our own time, has endured something similar.
After a number of gamine roles in which her hair was mousy brown, Bardot made her breakthrough in 1956, at age 22, in a now very genteel-looking Technicolor romantic comedy knowingly titled And God Created Woman. She played a devastatingly desirable blonde, doing the wasp-waisted, derriere-wiggling walk that was the last word in 50s sexiness.
Bardot did work with serious film-makers and it was her unhappy fate to be patronised by the biggest name of all: Jean-Luc Godard. In Le Mépris, or Contempt (1963), she plays Camille, the beautiful wife of Michel Piccoli’s troubled screenwriter. Bardot’s nakedness is displayed as the epitome of cinema’s tacky commercialism, but there is something cynical and misogynist in Godard’s approach.
While skiing in Meribel in 1965, Bardot was mortified when Charly, a German shepherd belonging to Alain Delon that she was looking after, bit a fellow skier on the leg: the victim was none other than French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was entranced by Bardot’s extravagant apologies and the way she slathered ointment on his leg; she turned him into an unlikely political ally.
Bardot was teased for her animal campaigns, even before she went full-time with them. Her home was a place where animals were allowed to wander indoors: six goats, a dozen cats, a rabbit, 20 ducks, a donkey and some sheep. The aroma was distinct.
She made some great films but my favourite is En Cas de Malheur, or In Case of Emergency (1958), a crime melodrama adapted from a Georges Simenon thriller and directed by Claude Autant-Lara. Bardot plays a woman accused of violent robbery who seduces her middle-aged lawyer into fabricating evidence that will acquit her. The lawyer is played by Jean Gabin, and there is a real, crackling chemistry between these two icons of French cinema, old and new. Their scenes together have a real tenderness and wonderful poignancy, especially when Bardot’s character believes herself to be in love with her kindly but cynical older man.
“On est heureuse!” she declaims to the heavens: We are happy! Watching Bardot in this film is enough to make you happy.
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PHOTOGRAPH: CHARLY HEL/PRESTIGE/GETTY
Despite political remarks, Bardot called animal rights her sole cause
ANALYSIS
Bardot, the Le Pens and France’s far right
29 Dec 2025 - The Guardian
Angelique Chrisafis
Brigitte Bardot, hailed as the French Marilyn Monroe, was the first major film star to channel her glamour and fame into supporting France’s far right, whom she backed for more than 30 years.
Up until her death yesterday, Bardot had expressed her contentment at the anti-immigration National Rally party’s rising share of the vote.
The film star, who quit cinema to become an animal rights activist, always said she only wanted to be remembered for the animal rights struggle, which she called her sole cause. But for years her public comments on immigration were divisive. With polls currently showing Marine Le Pen’s party likely to make the final round of the 2027 presidential race and as close as it has ever come to taking power, Bardot’s politics will be remembered as part of her legacy.
She was convicted five times for inciting racial hatred over remarks she had made – most of them about Muslims and what she called an “invasion” of foreigners in France, but also about people on the French-ruled island of Réunion, whom she described as “savages”.
In her final book, Mon BBcédaire (My BB Alphabet), published weeks before her death, Bardot said the right – which was how she referred to Le Pen’s party – was the “only urgent remedy to the agony of France”, which had become “dull, sad, submissive, ill, ruined, ravaged, ordinary and vulgar”.
From the 1990s, Bardot supported Jean-Marine Le Pen’s Front National, then backed his daughter Marine, who renamed the party National Rally (RN). Amid the rising presence of the far right on the French Riviera, Bardot met her husband Bernard d’Ormale through the Le Pen family at a dinner in Saint-Tropez. In 1993, Bardot married d’Ormale, a former adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Bardot said Marine Le Pen was “the only woman ... who has balls”. She backed Le Pen’s presidential bids of 2012 and 2017, particularly praising her criticisms of the presence of halal meat in France.
Le Pen in turn cited Bardot – whose image had been used as a model for Marianne, the female symbol of the French Republic – as the ultimate symbol of Frenchness.
Last year, after Emmanuel Macron called a snap election that saw the far right increase its presence in parliament, Bardot said Jordan Bardella, the RN’s young president, was “very good”. Bardella paid tribute to her after her death as an “ardent patriot”.
While saying she was resolutely of the right, Bardot also argued she could work with any politician who would stand up for animal rights, once praising the left’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon for his vegetarianism. In 2013, she threatened to leave France and apply for Russian citizenship if two elephants in Lyon zoo, suffering from tuberculosis, were euthanised. But having praised Vladimir Putin, she changed tack after the invasion of Ukraine.
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