Brigitte Bardot dead: France’s prototype of liberated female sexuality
Brigitte Bardot, the French actress idealized for her beauty and presented at mid-century as the prototype of liberated female sexuality, has died at 91.
Long retired from the entertainment industry, Bardot died at her home in the south of France, Bruno Jacquelin of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for Animal Welfare confirmed to the Associated Press. He gave no cause of death. Bardot had faced health issues in recent years, including hospitalization for a respiratory problem in July 2023 and additional hospital stays in 2025.
Bardot was known to be capricious, self-destructive, and prone to reckless romantic relationships with both men and women. She was a fashion icon and media darling who left acting at age 39 and lived the rest of her years in near isolation, periodically emerging to advocate for animal rights, lecture on moral decadence, and espouse bigoted political views.
And, as if to protest against her famous beauty, Bardot allowed herself to age naturally.
“For me, life is just the best and the worst, love and hate,” she told the Guardian in 1996. “Everything that happened to me was excessive.”
At her peak, Bardot was considered a national treasure in France, received by President Charles de Gaulle at the Élysée and exhaustively analyzed by existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. She was the girl whose poster adorned teenage John Lennon’s bedroom.
While Marilyn Monroe played coy, Bardot was frank and free about her sexuality, sleeping with her leading men unapologetically, sweating and writhing barefoot on a table in the controversial 1956 film “…And God Created Woman.” Although many of her films were largely forgotten, she projected a radical sense of female empowerment that had a lasting cultural influence.
Born September 28, 1934 in Paris, the daughter of a Parisian factory owner and his worldly wife, Bardot and her younger sister were raised in a Catholic religious household.
Bardot studied ballet at the Paris Conservatoire and, at the urging of her mother, took up modeling. At 14, she was on the cover of Elle magazine. 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 years-long relationship during which he cultivated the sex kitten persona that would seduce the world. But Bardot was not the cultured type. As Vadim once said: “She doesn’t act. She exists.”
Bardot married Vadim at age 18, and that same year he directed her in “…And God Created Woman”, playing a woman who falls in love with her older husband’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 emblem of French modernity.
“I wanted to show a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved like a boy, without any feeling of moral or sexual guilt,” Vadim said at the time.
In real life, Bardot left Vadim for her partner Jean-Louis Trintignant. She then mastered a comedic and erotic character in the popular 1957 comedy “Une Parisienne” and played a juvenile delinquent in the 1958 drama “Love Is My Profession.”
In 1959, she was pregnant with the child of French actor Jacques Charrier, whom she married. Together they had a son, Nicolas.
In Bardot’s scathing 1996 memoir, “Initials BB: Memoirs,” she details her crude attempts to abort the child, asking doctors for morphine and punching her stomach. Nine months after the baby was born, she said, she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and slit her wrists, the first of several apparent suicide attempts over the course of her life. When Bardot recovered, she relinquished custody of her son and divorced Charrier.
“I couldn’t be Nicolas’s roots because I was completely uprooted, unbalanced, lost in this crazy world,” she explained years later.
Bardot scored her biggest box office success in the 1960 noir drama “The Truth,” playing a woman on trial for the murder of her lover. Perhaps her best performance came in Jean-Luc Godard’s acclaimed melancholic 1963 adaptation, “Contempt,” as a wife who falls in love with her husband. She was later nominated for a BAFTA award for her performance as a circus performer turned political activist in the 1965 comedy “Viva Maria!” »
All the while, however, Bardot was courting drama and living large.
While married to German industrialist Gunter Sachs, she had an affair with French pop star Serge Gainsbourg. He wrote Bardot the erotic love song “Je t’aime…moi non plus”, which became a Donna Summer hit, modified and retitled “Love to Love You Baby”. By 1969, she had divorced Sachs and was romantically involved with everyone from Warren Beatty to Jimi Hendrix.
The celebrity life eventually wore on Bardot, and she began to fear that she would end up dying young like Marilyn Monroe or withering away in the public eye like Rita Hayworth. Although she exuded confidence, she admitted in her memoir that she struggled with depression as she sought to juggle the many moving parts of her chaotic life.
“The majority of great actresses have met a tragic end,” she told the Guardian. “When I said goodbye to this profession, to this life of opulence and glitter, of images and adoration, of the quest for desire, I was saving my life.”
Around age 40, she stopped acting and spent the rest of her life bouncing between her beach house in Saint-Tropez and a farm – complete with a chapel – in the Paris suburbs. She is dedicated to the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the welfare and protection of animals.
As an animal rights activist, her list of enemies was long: the Japanese for hunting whales, the Spanish for bullfighting, the Russians for killing seals, furriers, hunters and circus operators.
At her home in Saint-Tropez, dozens of cats and dogs – as well as goats, sheep and a horse – roamed freely. She chased away fishermen and was prosecuted for sterilizing a neighbor’s goat.
“My chickens are the happiest in the world, because I’ve been vegetarian for 20 years,” Bardot said.
In 1985, she was awarded the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian decoration, 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 collaborator of 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 Marine, the daughter of Le Pen, leader of France’s anti-immigration far-right.
Two French civil rights groups sued Bardot over xenophobic and homophobic comments she made in her 2003 book, “A Cry in the Silence,” in which she attacked Muslims, gays, intellectuals, drug addicts, female politicians, illegal immigrants and the “professional” unemployed. She was ultimately fined six times for inciting racial hatred, mainly for denouncing Muslims and Jews. She was fined again in 2021 for a 2019 rant in which she called residents of Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, “degenerate savages.”
“I have never had difficulty saying what I have to say,” Bardot wrote in a letter to The Times in 2010. “As for being a little rabbit who never says a word, that’s really the opposite of me.”
Bardot sparked controversy again in 2018 when she dismissed the #MeToo movement as a campaign fueled by “hatred of men.”
“I thought it was nice to be told I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass,” she told NBC. “That kind of compliment is nice.”
She remained firm on these views during the last year of her life, speaking out against the societal shame of playwright-comedian-actor Nicolas Bedos and actor Gérard Depardieu, both convicted of sexual assault. “Talented people who grab a girl’s butt are thrown into the ditch,” she said in a television interview in 2025, her first in 11 years. “We could at least let them continue to live. »
As Bardot grew older, she mostly kept to herself, content to do crossword puzzles when the newspaper arrived, tend to her menagerie, and send warmly written appeals to world leaders to end their mistreatment of animals. She was largely vague when asked if she was still married to D’Ormale.
“It depends on the day,” she said, laughing softly.
Piccalo is a former Times staff writer. Former staff writer Steve Marble contributed to this report.
