Brigitte Bardot, French screen legend, dies aged 91 | Brigitte Bardot
French actor and singer Brigitte Bardot, who became an international sex symbol before turning her back on the film industry to become an animal rights activist, has died at the age of 91.
“The Brigitte Bardot foundation announces with great sadness the death of its founder and president, Madame Brigitte Bardot, the world-famous actress and singer, who chose to give up her prestigious career to devote her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation,” said a statement sent to Agence France-Presse on Sunday, without specifying the time and place of death. The statement was included.
Bardot rose to international fame with the 1956 film And God Created Woman, written and directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim, and embodied the idea of the archetypal “sex kitten” for the next two decades. However, in the early 1970s he announced his retirement from acting and became increasingly politically active. His outspoken support for animal rights turned into incendiary comments about ethnic minorities and open support for France’s far-right National Front, resulting in a number of convictions for racial hatred.
Born in Paris in 1934, Bardot grew up in a wealthy, traditional Catholic family, but she excelled enough as a dancer to allow her to study ballet, earning a place at the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris. She also found work as a model and appeared on the cover of Elle magazine in 1950, when she was just 15 years old. As a result of her modeling work, she was offered film roles; At an audition, she met Vadim, whom she would marry in 1952, after she turned 18. Bardot was cast in smaller roles of increasing importance; In 1955, she played Dirk Bogarde’s love interest in Doctor at Sea, which was a huge hit in the UK.
But Vadim’s film And God Created Woman, in which Bardot played a shy teenager in Saint-Tropez, solidified her image and turned her into an international icon. The film was a huge success both in France and internationally, placing Bardot at the forefront of French cinema artists.
Bardot quickly became an inspiration to intellectuals and artists as well as moviegoers; especially the young John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who demanded that their then-girlfriends imitate her and dye their hair blonde. Columnist Raymond Cartier wrote a long article on this subject. “Le cas Bardot” When Simone de Beauvoir published her famous essay Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome in 1959, she framed the actor as the liberated woman in France. In 1969, Bardot was chosen as the first real-life model for Marianne, the symbol of the French republic.
In the early 1960s, Bardot appeared in a number of high-profile French films, including Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Oscar-nominated drama The Truth, Louis Malle’s Very Private Affair (opposite Marcello Mastroianni) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt. In the second half of the decade, Bardot received a number of offers from Hollywood, including Viva Maria, a period comedy set in Mexico with Jeanne Moreau! and the western film Shalako, opposite Sean Connery.
Bardot also had a parallel musical career, which included recording the original version of Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus, which Gainsbourg wrote for her while she was having an extramarital affair. (Fearing scandal after her then-husband Gunter Sachs learned of it, Bardot asked Gainsbourg not to release the song; she re-recorded it with Jane Birkin, to great commercial success.)
But Bardot found the pressures of stardom increasingly troubling, telling the Guardian in 1996: “The madness that surrounded me always seemed unreal. I was never really prepared for the life of a star.” He retired from acting in 1973 at the age of 39, after making the historical romance The Edifying and Joyous Story of Colinot. His primary focus was animal protection activism. Participating in protests against seal hunting in 1977 and the establishment of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in 1986.
Bardot later sent letters of protest to world leaders over issues such as the destruction of dogs in Romania, the killing of dolphins in the Faroe Islands, and the slaughter of cats in Australia. He also regularly published his outspoken views on religious animal slaughter. In his 2003 book A Cry in the Silence, he embraced right-wing politics and targeted gay men and lesbians, school teachers, and the so-called “Islamization of French society”, for which he was convicted of inciting racial hatred.
Bardot has a long history of supporting France’s National Front (since renamed the National Rally) and told the Guardian: “Regarding the terrible increase in immigration, I share this: [Jean-Marie Le Pen’s] purely opinions. in 2006 Letter to the then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy He said France’s Muslim population was “destroying our country by imposing their actions.”
Bardot was married four times: to Vadim between 1952 and 1957, to Jacques Charrier between 1959 and 1962 (with whom she had a son, Nicholas, in 1960), to Sachs (1966-1969), and to former Le Pen advisor Bernard d’Ormale, whom she married in 1992. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Gainsbourg.
