Brigitte Bardot dead: France’s prototype of liberated female sexuality
French actor Brigitte Bardot, idealized for her beauty and heralded as the prototype of liberated female sexuality at mid-century, has died at the age of 91.
Bardot, who had been away from the entertainment industry for a long time, died at her home in Southern France, Bruno Jacquelin of the Brigitte Bardot Animal Welfare Foundation confirmed to the Associated Press. He gave no cause of death. Bardot has struggled with health issues in recent years, including being hospitalized for breathing problems in July 2023 and additional hospital stays in 2025.
Bardot was known to be volatile, self-destructive, and prone to reckless love affairs with men and women. A fashion icon and media darling, she retired from acting at the age of 39 and lived out the rest of her years in near-reclusion, appearing periodically to advocate for animal rights, lecture about moral decay, and espouse bigoted political views.
And as if in protest of her famous beauty, Bardot happily allowed herself to age naturally.
“For me, life is just the best and the worst, love and hate,” he told the Guardian in 1996. “Everything that happened to me was extreme.”
In her prime, Bardot was considered a national treasure in France, received by President Charles de Gaulle at the Élysée Palace and extensively analyzed by existential philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. She was the girl whose poster adorned young John Lennon’s bedroom.
While Marilyn Monroe was reserved, Bardot was open and free about her sexuality; In the controversial 1956 film “…And God Created Woman,” she unapologetically slept with her co-stars, writhing on a table in sweaty, bare feet. While many of her films were largely forgettable, they reflected a radical sense of self-empowerment for women that had a lasting cultural impact.
Born in Paris on September 28, 1934, the daughter of a Parisian factory owner and his socialite wife, Bardot and her younger sister were raised in a devout Catholic home.
Bardot studied ballet at the Paris Conservatory and began modeling at her mother’s insistence. She was on the cover of Elle magazine when she was 14 years old. She caught the attention of filmmaker Marc Allegret, who sent his 20-year-old apprentice Roger Vadim to find her.
Vadim and Bardot began a relationship that lasted years, during which she developed the sex kitten persona that would seduce the world. But Bardot was not one to be improved upon. As Vadim once said, “He does not move. He exists.”
Bardot married Vadim at the age of 18, and that same year he directed her in “…And God Created Woman” as a woman who falls in love with her older brother’s younger brother. The film, which sparked moral outrage in the United States and was heavily edited before reaching theaters, made Bardot a star and an icon of French modernity.
Vadim said at the time: “I wanted to show a normal teenage girl whose only difference was that she behaved the way a boy could behave, without any feelings of guilt on a moral or sexual level.”
In real life, Bardot left Vadim for his co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant. He continued to master a comic-erotic persona in the popular 1957 comedy “Une Parisienne” and played a teenage delinquent in the 1958 drama “Love Is My Profession.”
In 1959, she was pregnant with French actor Jacques Charrier’s child and as a result, she married him. Together they had a son named Nicolas.
In Bardot’s scathing 1996 memoir, “Initiales BB: Mémoires,” she details her crude attempts to abort the child, asking doctors for morphine and punching him in the stomach. Nine months after the baby was born, she said, she drank a bottle of sleeping pills and slit her wrists, the first of many suicide attempts throughout her life. When Bardot recovered, she gave up custody of her son and divorced Charrier.
He explained years later: “I couldn’t be Nicolas’s roots because I was completely uprooted, unstable and lost in that crazy world.”
Bardot achieved her biggest box office success in the 1960 noir drama “The Truth,” playing a woman on trial for murdering her lover. Her best performance was probably in Jean-Luc Godard’s acclaimed 1963 melancholy adaptation “Contempt,” playing a woman who loses her love for her husband. He was later nominated for a BAFTA Award for his performance as a circus performer-turned-political agent in the 1965 comedy “Viva Maria!”
But in the meantime, Bardot dealt with the drama and lived large.
While married to German industrialist Gunter Sachs, she had an affair with French pop star Serge Gainsbourg. He wrote the erotic love song “Je t’aime… moi non plus” for Bardot, which later became a hit by Donna Summer, renamed and renamed “Love to Love You Baby”. She had divorced Sachs in 1969 and had been romantically linked to everyone from Warren Beatty to Jimi Hendrix.
Celebrity life eventually tired Bardot, and she began to fear that she would eventually die young, like Marilyn Monroe, or fade away from the public eye, like Rita Hayworth. Although he was confident, he admitted in his memoirs that he struggled with depression as he tried to juggle the many moving parts of his chaotic life.
“Most great actresses met tragic ends,” she told the Guardian. “When I said goodbye to this job, to this life of wealth and glitter, to images and fascinations, to the desired pursuit, I was saving my life.”
When he approached the age of 40, he retired from acting and spent the rest of his life shuttling between his beach house in Saint-Tropez and a farm – complete with a chapel – outside Paris. He devoted himself to this work Brigitte Bardot Foundation For the Welfare and Protection of Animals.
As an animal rights activist, her list of enemies was long: Whaling Japanese, bullfighting Spanish, seal-killing Russians, furriers, trappers and circus operators.
Dozens of cats and dogs, as well as goats, sheep and a horse, roamed freely in his home in Saint-Tropez. He chased away fishermen and was sued for sterilizing his neighbor’s goat.
“My chickens are the happiest in the world because I’ve been a vegetarian for the last 20 years,” Bardot said.
He was awarded France’s highest civilian honour, the Legion d’Honneur, in 1985, but refused to receive it until President François Mitterrand agreed to close the royal hunting grounds.
In 1992, she married Bernard d’Ormale, a former aide to Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front and a frequent candidate for the French presidency. Bardot later became an ardent supporter of Le Pen’s daughter Marine, the leader of France’s anti-immigrant far right.
Two French civil rights groups sue Bardot for being xenophobic and homophobic comments In his 2003 book “A Scream in the Silence,” he railed against Muslims, gays, intellectuals, drug addicts, female politicians, illegal immigrants and the “professional” unemployed. He was fined six times for inciting racial hatred, mostly speaking against Muslims and Jews. She was Fined again in 2021 on a 2019 rant in which he called residents of Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, “degenerate savages.”
“I have never had any difficulty saying what I have to say,” Bardot wrote in a 2010 letter to The Times. “As for being a little bunny who never says a word, that’s the exact opposite of me.”
Bardot once again sparked controversy in 2018 when she described the #MeToo movement as a campaign fueled by “man hatred.”
“I thought it was nice to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass,” she told NBC. “Such compliments are very nice.”
He remained true to these views in the last year of his life, condemning the social shaming of playwright-comedian-actor Nicolas Bedos and actor Gérard Depardieu, both of whom were convicted of sexual assault. “Talented people who grab a girl’s butt will be thrown to the bottom of the pit,” he said. 2025 TV interviewFor the first time in 11 years. “We could at least let them continue living.”
As Bardot grew older, she mostly remained on her own, content to solve crossword puzzles when the newspaper arrived, tend to the zoo, and send impassioned written appeals to world leaders to stop animal abuse. He was largely vague when asked if he was still married to D’Ormale.
“It depends on what day it is,” he said, laughing gently.
Piccalo is a former Times staff writer. Former staff writer Steve Marble contributed to this report.
