Brigitte Bardot

• 1. Introduction

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  Brigitte Bardot, known to the world by her initials B.B., was once praised by French president Charles de Gaulle as “the French export as important as Renault cars.” That is a striking thing to say about an actress. It is stranger still given how her story unfolded.

  Forty-seven films, several musicals and more than 60 recorded songs make up her output. Yet she walked away from the screen and never returned to it. Her face stayed everywhere anyway.

  Three questions run through her life. How did a girl raised under strict rules in a Paris apartment come to stand for an era's idea of freedom? What did she choose to do with her fame once the cameras were gone? And why did a woman decorated by the French state also spend years being fined by its courts?

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• 2. Childhood and Discovery

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  Number 1 Rue de la Pompe, in the luxurious 16th arrondissement of Paris, held the nine-bedroom apartment where Bardot grew up. She was born on the 28th of September 1934 in the 15th arrondissement. Her father, Louis Bardot, was an engineer who owned several factories in Paris. Her mother, Anne-Marie Mucel, was the daughter of an insurance company director. A younger sister, Mijanou, shared the household. Brigitte also had amblyopia, which weakened the vision in her left eye.

  A broken vase defined her childhood more than any luxury did. While playing indoors, Brigitte and Mijanou smashed their parents' favourite vase. Their father whipped each of them 20 times. Afterwards he treated both girls like strangers and made them address their parents with the formal vous. Bardot later said the incident taught her to resent her parents and shaped her rebellious adult life. Her father also demanded good table manners and proper clothes, and her mother chose her companions so carefully that she had very few friends.

  Nazi occupation of Paris during the Second World War pushed the family indoors. With civilian surveillance growing stricter, Bardot spent hours dancing to records. Her mother saw a possible ballet career and arranged lessons at a local studio. At seven, Bardot entered the private school Cours Hattemer, attending three days a week to leave time for dance. In 1949 she was accepted at the Conservatoire de Paris, where the Russian choreographer Boris Knyazev taught her ballet for three years. Weekends meant her paternal grandparents' property in Louveciennes, where a chalet imported from Norway for the Exposition Universelle of 1889 stood among large gardens.

  In that same year, 1949, Hélène Gordon-Lazareff hired her as a junior fashion model. Gordon-Lazareff directed the magazines Elle and Le Jardin des Modes. On the 8th of March 1950-15-year-old Bardot appeared on the cover of Elle. The cover brought an offer from director Marc Allégret to act in Les Lauriers sont coupés. Her parents objected, but her grandfather backed her. He said: “If this little girl is to become a whore, cinema will not be the cause.”

  At the audition she met Roger Vadim, who later told her she had not won the part. They fell in love instead. Her parents fiercely opposed the romance, and her father announced that she would continue her education in England, with a train ticket already bought for the next day. Bardot answered by putting her head into an oven with an open fire. Her parents pulled her away, and they accepted the relationship on one condition. She had to marry Vadim at the age of 18.

  Small film roles followed. In Crazy for Love, a 1952 comedy directed by Jean Boyer and starring Bourvil, she played a cousin of the main character for 200,000 francs, about US$575 at the time. Manina, the Girl in the Bikini, directed by Willy Rozier, came the same year. In April 1953 she drew press attention at the Cannes Film Festival, and she had a small part in Act of Love, a Hollywood-financed film shot in Paris with Kirk Douglas. In 1955 she took her first sizable English-language role in Doctor at Sea, opposite Dirk Bogarde. It was the third most popular film in Britain that year.

  For the Italian film Nero's Weekend, released in 1956, the director asked the brunette Bardot to appear as a blonde. She dyed her hair rather than wear a wig. She liked the result so much that she kept the colour.

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• 3. Becoming a Star

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  Naughty Girl, released in 1956, was the first of four films that made Bardot a star. Directed by Michel Boisrond and co-written by Vadim, this musical cast her as a troublesome schoolgirl. It also paired her with Alain Delon for the first time, in a sketch segment they shared. The film became the 12th most popular in France that year.

  Two more 1956 releases followed. Plucking the Daisy was also written by Vadim, and The Bride Is Much Too Beautiful co-starred Louis Jourdan. The fourth was the melodrama And God Created Woman, which marked Vadim's debut as a director. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Curt Jurgens played opposite her. It told of an immoral teenager in an otherwise respectable small town.

  In the United States, And God Created Woman grossed $12 million, with earnings of $4 million. Author Peter Lev called that “an astonishing amount for a foreign film at that time.” It was the highest-grossing foreign film ever released there. It also scandalized American audiences, and some theatre managers were arrested just for screening it. In Britain it ranked among the ten most popular films of 1957. From at least 1956 Bardot carried the nickname “sex kitten.”

  In June 1958, Paul O'Neil of Life magazine tried to explain her appeal. Like the European sports car, he wrote, she had reached America when the public was hungry for something “racier and more realistic than the familiar domestic product.” Photographers shaped the image too. Sam Lévin's pictures fed the sense of her sensuality, and the British photographer Cornel Lucas made portraits in the 1950s and 1960s that came to represent her public persona.

  The year 1958 brought two milestones. Bardot became the highest-paid actress in France. She was also voted among the top ten box office draws in North America on the strength of her French films alone, which had never happened before. In Case of Adversity that year cast her as a criminal who seduces Jean Gabin, and it was the 13th most seen movie in France. Babette Goes to War, a comedy set during the Second World War, was the fourth biggest film in France in 1959.

  The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir also took notice. Her 1959 essay The Lolita Syndrome built on existentialist themes to declare Bardot the most liberated woman of France. She described her as a “locomotive of women's history.”

  Henri-Georges Clouzot's courtroom drama The Truth, released in 1960, was a highly publicized production. It became Bardot's biggest commercial success in France, the third biggest hit of its year. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. In 1961 Bardot won the David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actress for her work in it.

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• 4. Abroad, Song and Retirement

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  Louis Malle's A Very Private Affair, released in 1962, was inspired by Bardot's own life and paired her with Marcello Mastroianni. In the mid-1960s she began making films that seemed aimed at the international market. Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris, from 1963, was produced by Joseph E. Levine and co-starred Jack Palance. The next year she appeared with Anthony Perkins in the comedy Une ravissante idiote.

  Dear Brigitte, from 1965, was her first Hollywood film. James Stewart played an academic whose son develops a crush on her. Her appearance was relatively brief, and the film was not a big success. Viva Maria!, a Western buddy comedy directed by Malle that same year, did better. Jeanne Moreau played opposite her, and the film was a big hit in France and many other countries, though not in the United States as much as had been hoped. It earned Bardot a BAFTA nomination for Best Foreign Actress.

  Disappointment followed. After a cameo in Godard's Masculin Féminin in 1966, she starred in Two Weeks in September, a French-English co-production released in 1968 that became her first outright flop in some years. Shalako, a Western from the same year starring Sean Connery, was another box-office disappointment. Bardot said she rejected Connery's advances on set, joking that she was not a James Bond girl.

  Music took up much of her time in the 1960s and 1970s. She recorded mostly with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, and her songs included “Harley Davidson,” “Bubble gum” and “La Madrague.” She also covered Stevie Wonder's “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” as “Le Soleil de ma vie.”

  The most famous song she nearly released was the duet “Je t'aime... moi non plus.” Bardot pleaded with Gainsbourg not to put it out, and he complied. He then rerecorded it with the British-born model and actress Jane Birkin, and that version became a massive hit all over Europe. Bardot's own version was finally issued in 1986. In 2006 Universal Music made its back catalogue available to buy online, and her version became the third most popular download.

  From 1969 to 1972 Bardot served as the official face of Marianne, the symbol of the liberty of France, who had been anonymous until then. In the late 1960s her silhouette also served as the model for the bust of the Marianne statue.

  Her last films were mostly comedies. Les Femmes, from 1969, was a flop, while The Bear and the Doll in 1970 performed better. The Legend of Frenchie King in 1971 was popular, helped by Claudia Cardinale as her co-star. In 1973 she made one more picture with Vadim, Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman, in which she played the title role. Vadim said it amused him to give her the part of a man.

  During that shoot Bardot said: “If Don Juan is not my last movie it will be my next to last.” She kept her word and made only The Edifying and Joyous Story of Colinot afterwards. In 1973 she announced her retirement from acting as “a way to get out elegantly.” In 1974 she appeared in a nude photo shoot for Playboy magazine, which celebrated her 40th birthday.

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• 5. The Animal Campaigner

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  In 1977 Bardot met Paul Watson during an operation to protest the killing of seal pups on the Canadian ice floe. Watson founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society that same year, and he invited her to come to the ice. She lay down beside the seal pups for photographs that were seen around the world. The two remained friends.

  By 1986 she had a larger plan. She established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the welfare and protection of animals. To fund it she auctioned off jewelry and personal belongings and raised three million francs, about US$430,000. She also became a vegetarian.

  A donkey dispute in 1989 gave her a day in court. She was looking after her neighbour Jean-Pierre Manivet's donkey when it showed excessive interest in her older donkey mare. Fearing that mating would prove fatal to the mare, Bardot had the neighbour's donkey castrated. Manivet sued, and Bardot won. The court ordered him to pay 20,000 francs for creating a “false scandal.”

  Horse meat became one of her fiercest causes. She urged French television viewers to boycott it, and in January 1994 she became the target of death threats. She did not back off. Instead she wrote to the minister of agriculture, Jean Puech, calling on him to ban its sale.

  Her letters also reached abroad. In 1999 she wrote to China's president Jiang Zemin, in a letter published in the French magazine VSD, accusing his country of torturing bears and killing the last tigers and rhinos for aphrodisiacs. In 2001 she gave more than US$140,000 over two years for a mass neutering and adoption program for the stray dogs of Bucharest, estimated at 300,000.

  In August 2010 she appealed to Queen Margrethe II of Denmark to halt the killing of dolphins in the Faroe Islands, calling it a “macabre spectacle.” On the 22nd of April 2011, French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand officially included bullfighting in the country's cultural heritage, and she wrote him a highly critical letter. On the 25th of May 2011, Sea Shepherd renamed its fast interceptor vessel MV Gojira as MV Brigitte Bardot in appreciation of her support.

  From 2013 her foundation worked with the Kagyupa International Monlam Trust of India to run an annual veterinary care camp, and she committed to animal welfare in Bodhgaya over several years. On the 23rd of July 2015 she condemned Australian politician Greg Hunt's plan to eradicate 2 million cats to save endangered species such as the Warru and the night parrot.

  At the age of 90 she took up Watson's cause. He had been detained in Greenland since the 21st of July 2024, when Japan requested his extradition. In mid-October 2024 her lawyers and Sea Shepherd France asked President Emmanuel Macron to grant him political asylum, and Bardot asked Macron to show “a little bit of courage.” She also led a demonstration for Watson in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. In a letter to Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen, she urged her to “not choose the camp of the oceans' gravediggers.”

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• 6. Love, Marriage and Motherhood

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  By her own count Bardot had 17 romantic relationships, and she was married four times. Her final marriage lasted longer than the previous three combined. She explained her pattern bluntly: “I have always looked for passion.” She often left a partner when, in her words, “the present was getting lukewarm.”

  On the 20th of December 1952, at Notre-Dame-de-Grace de Passy, she married Roger Vadim at 18. They separated in 1956 after she became involved with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant, and they divorced the following year. Trintignant was then married to actress Stéphane Audran. He and Bardot lived together for about two years, though they never married. Frequent absences for his military service and her affair with musician Gilbert Bécaud complicated things. Bardot and Vadim had no children together but stayed in contact for the rest of his life.

  After recovering from an overdose in 1958, she began a relationship with actor Jacques Charrier. They married in Louveciennes on the 18th of June 1959. She had become pregnant before the wedding. Bardot was extremely dismayed, having once said “I am not a mother, nor do I want to be one.” She sought an abortion, but abortion was illegal in France at the time.

  In the final months of the pregnancy photographers surrounded her house. Wary of the press, she decided to give birth at home. Nicolas-Jacques Charrier was born on the 11th of January 1960, seven months after the wedding, and he was her only child. Afterwards Bardot became depressed and attempted suicide. She later wrote that she was not made to be a mother, and she wrote of her son in terms so harsh that they would later end up in court.

  Bardot and Charrier divorced in 1962, and Charrier gained sole custody of Nicolas. When the boy was 12, he asked to stay with his mother, but she turned him away in favour of party guests. He did not speak to her afterwards. In her memoirs she wrote that she loved Nicolas most in the world, yet he wanted nothing to do with her. He married the Norwegian model Anne-Line Bjerkan in 1984, and Bardot was not invited. She became a grandmother when daughters were born in 1985 and 1990.

  In 1997 Charrier and Nicolas sued her and her publisher, Grasset, over the hurtful remarks in her memoir. She was ordered to pay Charrier £17,000 and Nicolas £11,000. By 2018 she said that she and Nicolas, himself a grandfather by then, spoke regularly and visited each other once a year.

  Her third marriage, to the German millionaire playboy Gunter Sachs, ran from the 14th of July 1966 to the 7th of October 1969, though they had separated the year before. In 1967, while still married to Sachs, she had a relationship with Serge Gainsbourg. Her fourth and last husband, Bernard d'Ormale, married her on the 16th of August 1992, and they stayed married until her death on the 28th of December 2025.

  There were many other names along the way. Sacha Distel had a much-publicized relationship with her from 1958 to 1959. She lived with Bob Zagury from 1963 to 1965. In 1975 she began a relationship with the artist Miroslav Brozek, who made sculptures of her, and they separated in December 1979. In 2018 she told Le Journal du Dimanche that rumours linking her to Johnny Hallyday, Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger were false.

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• 7. Words in Court

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  Bardot's 1999 book Le Carré de Pluton, meaning Pluto's Square, contained a passage criticizing the ritual slaughter of sheep during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. It also included a section titled “Open Letter to My Lost France.” In it she wrote that her homeland was “again invaded by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims.” She was fined €1,500 in 1997 for the original publication of that letter in Le Figaro, €2,785 in 1998 for similar remarks, and €4,500 in June 2000.

  Her 2003 book Un cri dans le silence, or A Scream in the Silence, drew new complaints. It criticized interracial marriage, immigration, the role of women in politics and Islam, and it attacked what she called the mixing of genes. It also mocked some gay men in demeaning terms. In her defence she wrote to a French gay magazine that, apart from her husband, she was surrounded by gay friends who had been her support for years. On the 10th of June 2004 a French court convicted her for the fourth time of inciting racial hatred and fined her €5,000. She denied the charge and apologized in court, saying: “I never knowingly wanted to hurt anybody. It is not in my character.”

  In 2008 she was convicted over a letter she had sent to Nicolas Sarkozy when he was minister of the interior. It objected to Muslims ritually slaughtering sheep, and it described a population that she said was “destroying us, destroying our country.” The trial concluded on the 3rd of June 2008 with a fine of €15,000. The prosecutor said he was weary of charging her with offences related to racial hatred.

  Her politics ran in a consistent direction. She had supported Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s. Her last husband, Bernard d'Ormale, was at one point an adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the far-right National Front, which became National Rally. Bardot called Marine Le Pen “the Joan of Arc of the 21st century” and endorsed her in the 2012 and 2017 presidential elections. In 2018 she backed the yellow vests protests. In 2008 she also called US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin “stupid” and a “disgrace to women,” citing Palin's positions on global warming, gun control and Arctic oil exploration.

  In 2014 she wrote an open letter demanding that France ban the Jewish ritual slaughter known as shechita. The European Jewish Congress answered that Bardot had shown insensitivity for minority groups again, and it said her longstanding support for the far right revealed a constant disdain for human rights. During the MeToo movement she told Paris Match that actresses who said they were harassed were “hypocrital, ridiculous, uninteresting.”

  On the 19th of March 2019 she wrote an open letter to Amaury de Saint-Quentin, the prefect of Réunion, accusing the island's inhabitants of animal cruelty. She referred to them as “autochtones who have kept the genes of savages.” The public prosecutor filed a lawsuit the following day.

  In June 2021 the Arras court fined her €5,000 for public insults against hunters. She had posted on her foundation's website that they carried the “genes of cruel barbarism inherited from our primitive ancestors.” On the 4th of November 2021, a French court convicted her over the Réunion letter and fined her €20,000, the largest fine of her career.

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• 8. Legacy and Last Years

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  The Bardot neckline, a wide-open neck that bares both shoulders, is named after her. It is especially common on knitted sweaters, though dresses and other tops use it too. Bardot also popularized the bikini, starting with her early films such as Manina in 1952. The following year she was photographed in one on every beach in southern France during the Cannes Film Festival. As late as 1959, American swimsuit designer Anne Cole said it was “at the razor's edge of decency.”

  In 1956 the shoemaker Repetto created a pair of ballet flats for her. She brought the choucroute hairstyle, similar to a beehive, and gingham clothes into fashion after wearing a checkered pink dress by Jacques Esterel at her wedding to Charrier. Around 1960 came the portrait known as the Bardot Pose, in which she wore only black pantyhose, cross-legged, with her arms crossed over her chest. Gisele Bündchen, Lindsay Lohan, Elle Macpherson and Rihanna have since copied it.

  She also put places on the map. In 1964 she visited the Brazilian town of Armação dos Búzios with Zagury, and the town now has a Bardot statue by Christina Motta. She is credited with popularizing Saint-Tropez as well, where a 700 kg statue standing 2.5 m high was erected in her honour in 2017. In 2021 that effigy was dressed in 1,400 gold leaves of 23.75 carats each.

  The young John Lennon and Paul McCartney idolized her. They planned a film with The Beatles and Bardot, similar to A Hard Day's Night, but it was never made. Lennon met her once, in 1968 at the May Fair Hotel, through Beatles press agent Derek Taylor. A nervous Lennon had taken LSD beforehand, and neither star impressed the other. He recalled: “I was on acid, and she was on her way out.”

  Bob Dylan dedicated the first song he ever wrote to her, according to the liner notes of his debut album, and he named her in “I Shall Be Free.” Andy Warhol painted her eight times in 1974. A Warhol portrait that Gunter Sachs had commissioned that year sold at Sotheby's in London in May 2012. Kylie Minogue borrowed the Bardot sex kitten look for her 2003 album Body Language. Bardot's reaction to the many women who copied her was dry: “None have my personality.”

  The first official exhibition on her influence opened in Boulogne-Billancourt on the 29th of September 2009, a day after her 75th birthday. Laetitia Casta played her in the 2010 French drama Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. In 2023 France 2 broadcast the drama series Bardot, covering her career from a casting at age 15 to the filming of The Truth. Olivia Rodrigo's “Lacy” and Chappell Roan's “Red Wine Supernova” also mention her. Her honours include the Legion of Honour in 1985, the United Nations Environment Programme's Global 500 Roll of Honour in 1992, and a PETA Humanitarian Award in 2001. In 1999 asteroid 17062 was named Bardot.

  Her private struggles surfaced in the press more than once. According to contemporary reports, on her 49th birthday in 1983 she swallowed sleeping tablets or tranquilizers with red wine at her Saint-Tropez home. She was found in the water at the nearby beach, taken to the L'Oasis clinic and discharged that evening. In 1984 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She declined chemotherapy, chose radiation therapy instead and recovered in 1986.

  On the 12th of May 2025, the 90-year-old Bardot gave a 47-minute interview at her Saint-Tropez house, broadcast on BFMTV. It was her first television appearance in eleven years. She said “Feminism isn't my thing. I like guys,” and she revealed that she used neither a mobile phone nor a computer. Five months later it was reported that she had been admitted to the Saint-Jean Hospital in Toulon three weeks earlier for surgery for a serious illness, and that she was recovering at home.

  Bardot died of cancer on the 28th of December 2025 at her home, La Madrague, in Saint-Tropez, aged 91. Macron called her a “legend of the century.” The Société Protectrice des Animaux, France's oldest animal-protection organization, described her as an “iconic and passionate figure for the animal cause.” Her foundation continues the work, and in her last days she was still calling for an end to stag hunting.

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