Brigitte Bardot, an icon of cinema and animal rights, has died

The Brigitte Bardot Foundation, which she founded, announced her death in a statement, expressing its “immense sadness” at the death of the woman “who chose to abandon her prestigious career to devote her life and energy to the defence of animals.”

The star of “Et Dieu… créa la femme” and “Le Mépris” died in the morning, at her famous residence, La Madrague, in Saint-Tropez, the foundation told AFP.

At the scene, the dirt track through the bamboo leading to the villa was blocked by a gendarmerie vehicle, an AFP journalist noted.

“We saw her often. I’d watch her go by and, when she was in a good mood, she’d blow us kisses,” said Nathalie Dorobisze, a 50-year-old Saint-Tropez resident, in tears. “It feels strange that she’s no longer here, because she’s always been here.”

La Madrague was a BB touchstone, and it was also the name of the fashion label she launched.

On the same social network, Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National, with whom Brigitte Bardot made no secret of her affinity, paid tribute to an “incredibly French” woman: “free, indomitable, uncompromising.”

In recent years, Brigitte Bardot, who embodied the liberalisation of social mores in 1950s France, was known above all for her statements on politics, immigration, feminism, hunters… some of which resulted in convictions for racist insults.

“Freedom means being oneself, even when it’s inconvenient,” she proclaimed defiantly, as the epigraph to a book titled “Mon BBcédaire”, published in early October.

Before making headlines for her stances, the woman known by her initials B.B. was nothing short of a myth.

That of a woman liberated from moral, sartorial, romantic and sexual codes—and from what was expected of her. A woman who “didn’t need anyone,” as Serge Gainsbourg had her sing in 1967, as familiar in Cannes as on Brazilian beaches.

Brigitte Bardot, the first celebrity to lend her features to the bust of Marianne, was a kind of French Marilyn Monroe- likewise blonde, with an explosive beauty and a tumultuous private life, hounded by the paparazzi.

B.B., Marilyn, “I’m sure their two stars form the most beautiful duo in the sky,” Francis Huster, who worked with Bardot in 1973, told AFP.

Marilyn was “a woman who was exploited, whom nobody understood, and who died as a result,” recalled Bardot, who had met her in 1956.

It was a mistake she would not repeat, bowing out at 39, leaving behind around 50 films and two scenes that have entered the pantheon of the Seventh Art: a feverish mambo in a Saint-Tropez restaurant (“Et Dieu… créa la femme”, 1956) and a monologue in which she, nude, listed the different parts of her body, at the opening of “Le Mépris” (1963).

“Nobody has described Bardot better than the writer François Nourissier,” former Cannes Film Festival president Gilles Jacob told AFP: “‘an unstable balance between caprice and damnation’.” Pierre Lescure, another ex-president of the festival, paid tribute to her “crazy, somehow new beauty- absolute and brazen.”

Nothing foretold such a destiny for the young Brigitte: born into a bourgeois Parisian family in 1934, she developed a passion for dance and tried her hand at modelling. At just 18, she married her first love, Roger Vadim, who gave her the role of Juliette in “Et Dieu… créa la femme,” a film that shook up the established order and branded her a sex symbol. With the film’s success, she shot film after film, stirred passions, and got burnt by the limelight.

In 1960, at the height of her fame, she gave birth to a boy, Nicolas, her only child, under the prying eye of the press. Declaring herself devoid of maternal instinct, the actress let her husband Jacques Charrier raise their son.

She later married German millionaire Gunter Sachs, then industrialist Bernard d’Ormale, who was close to the Front National.

Baby seals

She then became another Bardot, a figurehead for animal welfare. The turning point came on the set of her last film, “L’histoire très bonne et très joyeuse de Colinot trousse-chemise” (1973), opposite a goat that she bought and installed in her hotel room.

Defending elephants, opposing ritual slaughter, bullfighting, and the consumption of horsemeat… the fight was only just beginning.

In 1977, she travelled to the ice floes to raise awareness of the plight of baby seals, a highly publicised sequence that made the front page of Paris Match and left her with bitter memories.

Most of her second life unfolded out of the public eye, in the south of France, between La Madrague and a second, more discreet residence, La Garrigue. There she took in animals in distress and ran the foundation that bears her name, founded in 1986.

An organisation that continued to benefit from the glamorous image of her beginnings. The fashion label that bears her name, Brigitte Bardot Paris, offers modern collections inspired by the silhouettes of the 60s and 70s. The company that develops the brand donates a share of its revenue to Family Trademark TLM, which holds the exclusive worldwide rights to the Brigitte Bardot brand and funds the Brigitte Bardot Foundation. The former actress also has a lingerie brand in her name, Brigitte Bardot Lingerie.

In an interview with BFMTV in May, she confided that she longed for “peace, nature” and to live “like a farmer.” This autumn, she was hospitalised for an operation, the nature of which was not disclosed.

Evoking her death, she warned that she wanted to avoid the presence of “a crowd of arseholes” at her funeral.

FashionNetwork.com with AFP