Brigitte Bardot, the iconic international screen siren who retired from acting to become an animal rights activist, died Sunday, according to a representative from animal protection charity The Brigitte Bardot Foundation. She was 91.
Bardot ranked among the most beautiful women of all time, according to Esquire and legions of admirers. At the height of her fame, her last name was as indelible as Marilyn Monroe’s first. “Along with General de Gaulle and the Eiffel Tower, I am perhaps the best-known French person in the world!” she once wrote. French writer Simone de Beauvoir observed in 1962 that “Bardot is as important an export [to France] as Renault automobiles.” In 1970, she was immortalized in sculpture by artist Aslan as Marianne, the personification of the French Republic.
Bardot, also known as B.B., rose to stardom in the 1950s and ’60s, when foreign films found mainstream success in America, partly because of their more sexually explicit content. In Bardot’s 1956 breakout film, her then husband Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, she is first glimpsed sunbathing naked. Playing off the film’s title, the provocative tagline for the American release was, “But the Devil invented Brigitte Bardot.”
According to Vadim’s New York Times obituary, a climactic scene in that film in which Bardot danced barefoot on a table “is often cited as a breakthrough in what was considered permissible to show on screen.” Vadim is quoted: “There was really nothing shocking in what Brigitte did. What was provocative was her natural sensuality.”
The luxuriantly blonde Bardot was a fresh, naturalistic departure from the more glamorous and studied stars of the era. She was “a sex symbol, but talked like a woman you could meet on the street,” according to the documentary Discovering Brigitte Bardot.
Bardot made roughly 50 films between 1952 and 1973, the year she quit acting. Though none of her films are considered classics, she was a major box office draw, and she herself became a style icon who popularized the bikini and wearing tops off the shoulder. She worked with several distinguished directors, including Anatole Litvak (Act of Love, 1953), Henri-Georges Clouzot (La Vérité, 1960), Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt, 1963) and Louis Malle (Viva Maria!, 1965).
In her memoir, Initiales B.B.—published in France in 1996—Bardot also dished about her many lovers, including actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Warren Beatty and musician Serge Gainsbourg. She wrote of gaining entrance to Marlon Brando’s hotel room disguised as a chambermaid, then fleeing because of the room’s smell and slovenliness.
