Brigitte Bardot, French Movie Icon Who Renounced Stardom, Dies at 91

Brigitte Bardot, the pouty, tousle-haired French actress who redefined mid-20th-century movie sex symbolism in films beginning with “And God Created Woman,” then gave up acting at 39 to devote her life to the welfare of animals, died on Sunday at her home in southern France. She was 91.

Fondation Brigitte Bardot, which she established for the protection of animals, announced her death.

Ms. Bardot was 23 when “And God Created Woman,” a box-office flop in France in 1956, opened in the United States the next year and made her an international star. Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times, called her “undeniably a creation of superlative craftsmanship” and “a phenomenon you have to see to believe.” Like many critics, he was unimpressed by the film itself.

Ms. Bardot’s film persona was distinctive, compared with other movie sex symbols of the time, not only for her ripe youthfulness but also for her unapologetic carnal appetite. Her director was her husband, Roger Vadim, and although they soon divorced, he continued to shape her public image, directing her in four more movies over the next two decades.

The author Simone de Beauvoir, in a 1959 essay, “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome,” saw Ms. Bardot’s powerful onscreen erotic presence as a feminist challenge to “the tyranny of the patriarchal gaze” represented by the movie camera. The challenge failed, Beauvoir concluded, but it was a “noble failure.”

Few of Ms. Bardot’s movies were serious cinematic undertakings, and she later told a French newspaper that she considered “La Vérité,” Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Oscar-nominated 1960 crime drama, the only good film she ever made.

Nicknamed B.B. (pronounced in French much like the word for baby), she was best known for light comedies like “The Bride Is Much Too Beautiful” (1956), “Babette Goes to War” (1959) and “The Vixen” (1969), but she did work with some of France’s most respected directors.

Early in her career she appeared in René Clair’s “Grandes Manoeuvres” (1955). Jean-Luc Godard directed her in the 1963 film-industry drama “Contempt.” Louis Malle was her director on “A Very Private Affair” (1962), a drama that also starred Marcello Mastroianni, and “Viva Maria!” (1965), a western comedy in which she and Jeanne Moreau played singing strippers who become revolutionaries in early-20th-century Central America. That film earned her the only acting-award nomination of her career, as best foreign actress, from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Although she made several films in English, Ms. Bardot never worked in the United States. The closest she came to Hollywood roles were small parts, when she was still unknown, in Robert Wise’s “Helen of Troy” (1956), a Warner Bros. picture filmed in Italy, and “Act of Love” (1953), a Kirk Douglas film shot in France and directed by Anatole Litvak. “Shalako,” a 1968 western in which she was cast opposite Sean Connery, was a British-German production filmed in Spain and England.

At the height of her popularity, almost everything about Ms. Bardot was copied — her deliberately messy hairstyle, her heavy eye makeup and her fashion choices, which included tight knit tops; skinny pants; gingham; and flounced skirts showing off bare, sun-tanned legs. In 1969, she became the first celebrity to be used as the model for Marianne, a traditional symbol of the French Republic that adorns town halls across the country.

In a statement on Sunday, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said, “Her films, her voice, her dazzling fame, her initials, her sorrows, her generous passion for animals, her face that became Marianne — Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom.”

She helped turn St.-Tropez, once a quiet fishing port in the South of France, into a painfully fashionable resort town after she bought a home there in 1958. Two decades later, when she publicly complained about the deteriorating quality of life in St.-Tropez, the mayor replied, “I ask the question: Who brought vice and lewdness here?”

When Ms. Bardot announced her retirement from films in 1973, she had already begun her work on behalf of animal rights and welfare (although she had told an American reporter in 1965, “I adore furs”). But it was only in 1986, a year after she was made a chevalier of France’s Legion of Honor, that she created the Fondation Brigitte Bardot, based in Paris, which has waged battles against wolf hunting, bullfighting, vivisection and the consumption of horse meat. In 1987, she auctioned off her jewelry and other personal belongings to ensure the foundation’s financial base.

“I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she was quoted as saying at the time, “and now I am giving my wisdom and experience, the best of me, to animals.”

Four decades later, the foundation said in its statement on Sunday, it has taken in more than 12,000 animals and worked in 70 countries. It called Ms. Bardot “an exceptional woman who gave everything and sacrificed everything for a world that is more respectful of animals.”

In recent decades, Ms. Bardot continued to appear in public to promote animal rights, but she gained notoriety for her political views, which many saw as racist. This came to particular light in her two-volume memoir, “Initiales B.B.” (1996-97), in which she made negative comments about several groups, including Muslims. In 2004, she was convicted of inciting racial hatred, and fined, for similar comments in “A Cry in the Silence,” a nonfiction best seller in which she referred to Muslims as “cruel and barbaric invaders” and made derogatory comments about gay people.

By 2008, she had been convicted of the same charge five times.

At best, Ms. Bardot was considered eccentric in her later years, prompting observations that this former sex kitten, as she was often called, had turned into a “crazy cat lady.” Interviewed by the magazine Paris Match in January 2018, she denounced the #MeToo movement, calling actresses’ claims of sexual harassment “hypocritical, ridiculous, without interest.”

A few weeks later, in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, Kate McKinnon, as Ms. Bardot, shouted, “Free Harvey Weinstein!” Catherine Deneuve, played by Cecily Strong in the sketch, explained, “Brigitte is very old and very wrong.”

But Ms. Bardot defended at least one important aspect of her chosen way of life.

“I am not a recluse,” she told The Toronto Star in 1988. “I live like an unsociable person; it is different.”

“People,” she added, “get on my nerves.”

Brigitte Bardot was born into wealth on Sept. 28, 1934, in Paris, the older of two daughters of Louis and Anne-Marie Bardot. Her father was an industrialist, and she grew up in the city’s affluent 16th arrondissement. She began modeling as a teenager and appeared on the cover of Elle magazine at 15.

Her parents objected both to her acting aspirations and to her relationship with Mr. Vadim, then a young assistant to the film director Marc Allégret. This led to the first of at least four reported suicide attempts. The Bardots eventually relented about Mr. Vadim, and she married him in 1952, less than three months after her 18th birthday.

She had already made her film debut that year in “Manina, la Fille Sans Voile,” a romantic adventure that was released in the United States six years later as “The Girl in the Bikini,” and a family comedy, “Le Trou Normand.” By the time “And God Created Woman” made Ms. Bardot a star, she had appeared in more than a dozen films. She would make fewer than four dozen altogether.

Her last movie appearance was a supporting role in “The Edifying and Joyous Story of Colinot,” a 1973 comedy about a young man’s numerous romantic encounters. (She played an older woman who taught him valuable life lessons.) Her last starring role was in “If Don Juan Were a Woman,” a poorly reviewed 1973 drama directed by Mr. Vadim that was released in the United States in 1976.

Ms. Bardot married four times and had well-publicized long-term romantic relationships with other men, including the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and the singer and songwriter Serge Gainsbourg. She and Mr. Vadim divorced in 1957. Her second husband (1959-62) was the actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she had a son. After the couple divorced, the boy was brought up by Mr. Charrier’s parents, but he reconciled with his mother in adulthood. Mr. Charrier died in 2025.

Ms. Bardot was married to Gunter Sachs, a German industrialist, from 1966 to 1969. After their divorce, she did not marry again until 1992.

She is survived by her fourth husband, Bernard d’Ormale, a former adviser to the late right-wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen; her son, Nicolas Charrier; a sister, Marie-Jeanne Bardot; two granddaughters; and three great-grandchildren.

Ms. Bardot often spoke with bitterness about her movie career and about fame, which she said had stolen her privacy and happiness. In 1996, she summed up her point of view to a reporter for The Guardian.

“With me, life is made up only of the best and the worst, of love and hate,” she said. “Everything that happened to me was excessive.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.

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