afp/dpa/ | The French film icon Brigitte Bardot has died. The former actress died at the age of 91, her foundation announced on Sunday.
“The Fondation Brigitte Bardot announces with great sadness the death of its founder and president, Brigitte Bardot, a worldwide renowned actress and singer who had resolved to give up her glittering career in order to dedicate her life and energy to animal protection and to her foundation,” the statement said.
In her last decades of life, Bardot lived largely away from the public eye. Through her foundation she devoted herself to the welfare and rights of animals.
The actress rose to worldwide fame in the 1950s with seductive roles. Bardot’s international breakthrough as an actress came with “And God Created Woman.” In it Bardot plays an 18-year-old orphan who turns men’s heads. In the Roger Vadim film, shot in the mid-1950s, she pushed to the edge of what was allowed on camera in terms of sexuality at the time.
Her collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt, Masculin Féminin), Louis Malle (Viva Maria!), Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Truth). At the peak of her career in 1973/74 Bardot withdrew from the world of cinema. She was tired of the star bustle. “I hate people. I find my balance in nature, in the company of animals,” she explained. Yet even after only a few active years as a film star, B.B., as her fans called her, had entered film history. She was at times among the most photographed women in the world and leaves behind more than 45 films.
A Radical Life
Aside from her film work, Bardot also discovered the world of chanson. She became famous mainly for the provocative songs of the singer, actor, and composer Serge Gainsbourg. Among the best-known chansons he wrote for her is “Harley Davidson.”
Until the end of her acting career Bardot led a jet-set life. She lived and loved unabashedly and paved the way for the sexual revolution with her self-determined femininity. She was linked with Gainsbourg, had a relationship with actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, and was married several times, including to the industrialist and Playboy Gunter Sachs.
In 1992 she married a friend and adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right Front National party (today: RN, Rassemblement National). Bardot did not hide her right-wing extremist positions. In the final years of her life she drew headlines mainly for misanthropic statements and publications against homosexuals, France’s left, the homeless, or illegal immigrants.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to Bardot as “a legend of the century.” She embodied a life of freedom, he wrote on the platform X. “French existence, universal splendor. She touched us,” read the post. He recalled, among other things, her films, her voice, her fame and her generous passion for animals.
