Brigitte Bardot, the French actress idealized for her beauty and hailed at mid-century as a model of liberated female sexuality, has died aged 91.
Long removed from the entertainment industry, Bardot died at her home in the south of France, Bruno Jacqueline of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for Animal Welfare confirmed to The Associated Press. He did not give a cause of death. In recent years, Bardot has dealt with poor health, including long periods of hospitalization. breathing problem in July 2023 and additional hospitalizations in 2025.
Bardot was known for her mobility, self-destruction, and penchant for reckless love affairs with men and women. She was a fashion icon and media darling who retired from acting at 39 and lived out the remainder of her years in near seclusion, appearing periodically to advocate for animal rights, lecture on moral decay and espouse fanatical political views.
And, as if in protest against her famous beauty, Bardot happily allowed herself to age naturally.
“With me, life is only the best and the worst, love and hate,” she told the Guardian in 1996. “Everything that happened to me was excessive.”
In her prime, Bardot was considered a French national treasure, received by President Charles de Gaulle at the Elysee Palace and carefully analyzed by the existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. This was the girl whose poster adorned John Lennon's teenage bedroom.
While Marilyn Monroe feigned coyness, Bardot was open and free about her sexuality, sleeping with her leading men without apology, sweating and writhing barefoot on a table in the controversial 1956 film…And God Created Woman. Although many of her films have been largely forgotten, she demonstrated a radical sense of female empowerment that has had a lasting cultural impact.
Born on September 28, 1934 in Paris, the daughter of a Parisian manufacturer and his secular wife, Bardot and her younger sister grew up in a religious Catholic family.
Bardot studied ballet at the Paris Conservatory and, at the insistence of her mother, took up modeling. At age 14, she was on the cover of Elle magazine. She caught the attention of director Marc Allegret, who sent his 20-year-old student Roger Vadim to find her.
Vadim and Bardo began a long-term romance, during which he cultivated the image of a sex kitten who would seduce the world. But Bardo was not the type to be cultivated. As Vadim once said: “It doesn’t act. It exists.”
Bardot married Vadim at age 18 and sent her to “…And God created woman” like a woman who falls in love with her older husband's younger brother. The film, which caused moral outrage in the United States and was carefully edited before hitting 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 as a boy would behave, without any sense of guilt, either on a moral or sexual level,” Vadim said then.
In real life, Bardot left Vadim for her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant. She then mastered the comic-erotic image in the popular 1957 comedy “A Woman of Paris” and played a young criminal in the 1958 drama “Love is My Profession.”
By 1959, she was pregnant with the child of French actor Jacques Charrier, whom she eventually married. Together they had a son, Nicholas.
In Bardot's scathing 1996 memoir, Initiales BB: Mémoires, she details her crude attempts to end her pregnancy, asking doctors for morphine and punching herself in the stomach. Nine months after giving birth, she said she drank a bottle of sleeping pills and cut her wrists, the first of several apparent suicide attempts in her life. When Bardot recovered, she gave up custody of her son and divorced Charrier.
“I couldn’t be Nicholas’s roots because I was completely uprooted, unbalanced, lost in this crazy world,” she explained years later.
Bardot achieved her greatest box office success in the 1960 noir drama The Truth, playing a woman on trial for the murder of her lover. Her best performance probably came Jean-Luc GodardThe famous melancholy 1963 adaptation, Contempt, tells the story of a wife who falls out of love with her husband. She was later nominated for a BAFTA Award for her performance as a circus performer turned politician in the 1965 comedy Viva Maria!
However, all this time, Bardot strived for drama and lived large.
While married to German industrialist Gunter Sachs, she had an affair with a French pop star. Serge Gainsbourg. He wrote Bardot an erotic love song, “Je t'aime… moi non plus”, which later became a hit for Donna Summer, modified and renamed “Love to Love You Baby”. By 1969, she was divorced from Sachs and had romantic relationships with everyone from Warren Beatty to Jimi Hendrix.
Bardot eventually grew tired of celebrity life and began to fear that she would die young, as Marilyn Monroe or fading for all to see, like Rita Hayworth. Although she exuded confidence, she admitted in her memoir that she struggled with depression while trying to juggle the many moving parts of her chaotic life.
“Most great actresses have met tragic ends,” she told the Guardian. “When I said goodbye to this work, to this life of wealth and splendor, images and adoration, to the search for what I wanted, I was saving my life.”
When she was about 40, she gave up acting and spent the rest of her life bouncing between her beach house in St. Tropez and a farm with a chapel outside Paris. She dedicated herself to the cause Brigitte Bardot Foundation on Animal Welfare and Protection.
As an animal rights activist, her list of enemies was long: the Japanese for whaling, the Spanish for bullfighting, the Russians for killing seals, furriers, hunters and circus performers.
In her home in Saint-Tropez, dozens of cats and dogs, as well as goats, sheep and horses, roamed freely. She chased away the fishermen and was sued for sterilizing her neighbor's goat.
“My chickens are the happiest in the world because I've been a vegetarian for the last 20 years,” Bardot said.
In 1985, she was awarded the Legion of Honor, France's highest civilian honor, but refused to receive it until President Francois Mitterrand agreed to close the royal hunting grounds.
In 1992, she married Bernard d'Ormal, a former aide to 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 Le Pen's daughter. Nauticalleader of the far-right anti-immigration movements in France.
Two French human rights organizations sued Bardot for xenophobia and homophobia. comments she wrote in her 2003 book, A Scream in Silence, in which she criticizes Muslims, gays, intellectuals, drug addicts, female politicians, illegal immigrants and the “professional” unemployed. She was eventually fined six times for inciting racial hatred, mainly for speaking out against Muslims and Jews. She was fined again in 2021 over a 2019 rant in which she called the people of Reunion, a French Indian Ocean island, “degenerate savages.”
“I have never had a problem saying what I want to say,” Bardot wrote in Letter to The Times, 2010. “As for the little bunny who never says a word, that’s the exact opposite of me.”
Bardot sparked controversy again in 2018 when she called the #MeToo movement a campaign fueled by “hating men.”
“I thought it was nice to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a cute butt,” she told NBC. “Such a compliment is very pleasant.”
She remained steadfast in these views in the last year of her life, denouncing the public shaming of playwright, comedian and actor Nicolas Bedos and actor Gérard Depardieu, who were both convicted of sexual assault. “People with talent who grab a girl by the butt are thrown to the bottom of the ditch,” she said in a statement. TV interview 2025her 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 newspapers arrived, tend to her menagerie, and mail passionately written appeals to world leaders to stop cruelty to animals. When asked if she was still married to D'Ormal, she answered vaguely.
“It depends on what day it is,” she said, laughing softly.
Piccalo is a former Times staff writer. Former staff writer Steve Marble contributed to this report.
