Brigitte Bardot was a very carnal incarnation of the new, sexually liberated woman, wrote film critics in the 1950s and 60s. (“I understand your main interest is animals,” said a flustered BBC interviewer. “No,” replied Bardot, “my main interest is sex.”) That was how Bardot, who has died aged 91, was sold as a film star but, in truth, she could have been a character from a novel by Colette, whose subject was always l’amour – love as a transaction, or a madness, seldom a liberation.
All Bardot’s incarnations might have been invented by Colette: Bardot the nubile teen so flattered by the attentions of the film-maker Roger Vadim that at 16 she attempted suicide to blackmail her parents into sanctioning their marriage; the adult Bardot who wept if she slept alone, and found that the sacks of letters from fans could not soothe her woes; Bardot the spirit of Saint-Tropez, who drugged herself with sun (“You can be barefoot and have worries,” she said later). Even Bardot the retired, reclusive star who felt that her love was returned by the animals she championed, was so very Colette.
Bardot had been talent-spotted in her teens dancing in a show for the millinery shop run by her mother, Anne-Marie (nee Mucel), and she featured on the March 1950 cover of Elle magazine. By then, she had had 10 years of ballet training, some at the Paris Conservatoire, as the proper accomplishment for the daughter of the prosperous Parisian manufacturer Louis Bardot, and also attended the private Cours Hattemer school.
Vadim, then a director’s assistant, saw the Elle picture, and told Bardot’s mother: “It would be fascinating to take your daughter and make it seem as if she has gone completely off the rails.” Bardot and Vadim married when she was 18, and she became a willing accomplice in his plans to invent a directorial career for himself and a screen identity for her.
At first, Bardot played the pert, brunette soubrette for French directors who needed quick, cheap flicks animated by the rebelliousness of postwar youth, though René Clair, in Les Grandes Manoeuvres (1955), saw melancholy in her freshness. The initials BB are pronounced in French bébé, baby, and this enfant terrible showed off by leaping in the air, clad in a bikini, in the early years of the Cannes film festival.
Then, in 1956, Vadim extended her early French fame into international stardom with Et Dieu … Crea la Femme (And God Created Woman), in which she played the small-town siren of Saint-Tropez, her natural habitat – the Bardot family had a holiday home there. Vadim’s very original concept was to project her as passionate, yet young and playful, at a time when passionate women were presented onscreen as mature, as peasants or, if sophisticated, as tramps. As a sex object Bardot was never described as a tigress, goddess or idol, but as a “kitten”. On and off-screen she appeared adolescent, dressed in gingham sundresses and dark Left Bank outfits. Her hair was bleached blond (at first just for a movie part) and tousled, and she had Beat-style black round her eyes and false lashes like fir branches.
Bardot had no illusions about her performing talent, and said that she reacted to, rather than acted with, her leading men – her first take was always the best; And God Created Woman was promoted with entirely true gossip about her infidelity with her married co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant. It was a greater success in the US than in France, and she became a valuable export.
Her divorce from Vadim in 1957 began the other public narrative of her life, the personal drama. Her marriages, affairs and depressions interested the French even more than her films; at the peak of fascination, a survey claimed that 47% of all French conversation was about Bardot and only 41% about politics. In 1960 Simone de Beauvoir wrote Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, comparing Bardot with James Dean in an essay that discussed “the fever of living, the passion for the absolute, the sense of the imminence of death”. Dean had those. What Bardot had was the ability to make male cinemagoers feel, as the critic Sean French put it, that sex, sun and cigarettes were good for you. But De Beauvoir was spot-on in describing how “BB offers herself directly to each spectator ... but they are fully aware [she] is completely inaccessible.”
Unavailable to most, but she got any man she desired. After Trintignant there were, among others, the singers Sacha Distel and Gilbert Bécaud, and Jacques Charrier, her co-star in Babette S’en Va-t-en Guerre (Babette Goes to War, 1959), whom she married that year. Long afterwards, she wrote that she married him because of an accidental pregnancy that she could not terminate discreetly as Swiss clinics were too fearful of her fame. Charrier later rejected in the French libel courts her accusation that he forced her to go through with the pregnancy. Her relationship with their son, Nicolas, was at best chilly.
Aged 26, Bardot was found in a field, in a coma. She had taken sleeping tablets in anguish over the actor Sami Frey, with whom she starred in La Vérité (The Truth, 1960). The chemist who had sold her the drug was asked why he did so. “I serve a hundred Bardots every day,” he shrugged, summarising how Bardolatry dominated France.
The next husband was the photographer Gunter Sachs, who chased her on a bet; they married in 1966 after he charmed her with 1,200 roses showered from a helicopter over her home. She had a fling in 1967 with the musician Serge Gainsbourg, and they recorded a never-released version of Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus, though she had several musical hits with her breathy voice – some, including Harley Davidson and Bonnie & Clyde, with Gainsbourg; he dedicated Initials BB, a 1968 song and album, to her.
That year, she posed as model for a new bust of Marianne, personification of France in town halls all over the land. “You can’t have for yourself what belongs to the nation,” Charrier had complained, “whether it’s BB or camembert.” Mireille Mathieu took over as Marianne in 1978; Bardot was appointed to the Légion d’honneur in 1985.
Most of her mid-career films were less engaging than the life story. She was supposed to be a serious presence in court in Henri-George Clouzot’s La Vérité, but simply seemed glum. Jean-Luc Godard had to cast her for commercial reasons in Le Mépris (1963, from a novel by Alberto Moravia) and the contempt of the film’s title also described his attitude to Bardot, whom he displayed horizontally naked the full width of a Cinemascope screen, like a carcass along a butcher’s counter.
Louis Malle, in his Vie Privée (1962), was sympathetic to Bardot, by then ill-at-ease with her public persona, and he cast her again in his daft but internationally popular Viva Maria! (1965), although, as a chorus girl turned Mexican revolutionary, she came across as tense and petulant; she didn’t want to be doing this. Jeanne Moreau had the better fun in the film.
What she might have been, without the adulation or the misery, was most visible in that trivial comedy Babette Goes to War, where, with her hair hidden under a cap and her dancer’s grace evident in a boilersuit, she was a genuine gamine, although one with a limited future. How could Bardot, the kitten promoted as living for today, plan to restyle herself as a sleek cat? After some 40 films, most of which she merely tolerated, she retired before her 40th birthday; her final weary appearance came in Don Juan, Ou Si Don Juan Était une Femme (1973), again for Vadim.
She had protested against animal cruelty, loudly and publicly, while still a star, and her early 60s activism led to France’s “BB law”, specifying more humane abattoir practices.
After retirement, campaigning for animal welfare became her life. She travelled to the Arctic in 1977 to wobble on bloody ice floes bearing witness to a seal-cull, and met a new partner, the wildlife television presenter Allain Bougrain-Dubourg, while waiting for a flight at Newfoundland airport. At first she could not make her animal foundation work, and love also foundered again when, after seven years, Bougrain-Dubourg reluctantly left, finding her too depressed. She attempted to kill herself on her 49th birthday.
The Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals was established on solid ground in 1986, funded by an auction of the possessions of her old life, including the dress she had worn at her wedding to Vadim, a £100,000 diamond presented to her by an admirer, and jewellery from all the marriages. She was active against horse slaughtering, fur-wearing, animal testing, bullfighting and battery farming, and an anti-whale-hunting ship was named after her.
Bardot had bought, in 1958, La Madrague, a boathouse-shack at the far, beach, end of a track near Saint-Tropez. When it became too easily breached – fans arrived in the bedroom and pursued her beneath the sheets for autographs, regular burglars made off with her underwear – she often retreated further to a cabin, La Garrigue. Both were sanctuaries for dogs, cats, donkeys and lambs, as well as for Bardot.
On rainy afternoons in these places, over many years, she wrote her memoirs. Initiales BB (1996) became a million-seller, as did its sequel, Pluto’s Square (1999); in them she was frank about the many discarded lovers, the abortions and the despair, but she was also an incorrigible social conservative about race, homosexuality and immigration. In 1992 she had married Bernard d’Ormale, adviser to the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. As usual, it was romantic love at first sight; they wed impromptu in a remote Norwegian church. Their shared views lent durability to the union, and Bardot later endorsed Marine Le Pen’s runs for the presidency.
Bardot’s anti-immigration, anti-Muslim pronouncements, which came originally from her disdain for crowds and the practices of halal butchery, led to repeated court appearances into her final years and serious fines for inciting racial and religious hatred in print. Yet it was not her political associations or snobbery that were criticised in the attacks that appeared on her every birthday with a zero, but her ageing; she had a handsome face, but it had long since ceased to be the image that was commercialised (without her permission, and to her annoyance) all over Saint-Tropez, like a sexy local saint. “I don’t need to be beautiful now,” she said, although she had once believed that her identity would disintegrate when desire vanished from men’s gaze. “How ugly she looks,” said a bystander when she led an animal rights demo. “I’m not ugly, I’m Bardot,” she replied.
She is survived by D’Ormale and her son.
• Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot, actor and animal rights campaigner, born 28 September 1934; died 28 December 2025
