Brigitte Bardot, 1960s French icon-turned-animal rights activist, dies at 91

Brigitte Bardot, the iconic French star of the 1960s who rose to fame as one of the 20th century’s most celebrated screen sirens has passed away. Bardot was 91.

Bardot passed away on Sunday at her home in southern France, according to Bruno Jacquelin of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Protection of Animals. Speaking to The Associated Press, he said no cause of death had been disclosed and that funeral or memorial plans had not yet been announced. She had been hospitalized the previous month.

Brigitte Bardot dies: How the blonde bombshell revolutionised French cinema

She became an international sensation in 1956 with And God Created Woman, directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim, in which she played a sexually provocative teenage bride. The film caused a scandal, particularly for scenes showing Bardot dancing provocatively on tables, and cemented her status as a symbol of liberated sexuality. before later reinventing herself as a fierce animal rights activist and outspoken far-right supporter, has died at the age of 91.

Over a film career that included more than two dozen movies and three marriages, Bardot came to embody a France shedding its bourgeois restraint. Her messy blonde hair, curvaceous figure and defiant sensuality made her one of the country’s most recognisable faces.

After retiring from cinema, Bardot launched a second public life as an animal rights campaigner. She traveled to the Arctic to protest the killing of baby seals, denounced animal testing in laboratories, and spoke out against religious slaughter practices, including Muslim rituals, stances that often drew both attention and criticism.

“Man is an insatiable predator,” Bardot told The Associated Press on her 73rd birthday, in 2007. “I don’t care about my past glory. That means nothing in the face of an animal that suffers, since it has no power, no words to defend itself.”

In 1985, she was awarded the Legion of Honor, the nation’s highest recognition.

She was convicted and fined on five occasions by French courts for inciting racial hatred, with the cases stemming from statements linked to her opposition to the Muslim tradition of slaughtering sheep during religious festivals.

Bardot's political turn was reinforced by her 1992 marriage to her fourth husband, Bernard d’Ormale, a former adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right National Front leader.

Vadim, a French film producer whom she married in 1952, recognised Bardot’s star potential and wrote And God Created Woman. The film proved hugely influential and shaped the sensibilities of New Wave filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and came to symbolize the era’s embrace of hedonism and sexual liberation.

Her filmography included titles such as A Parisian (1957); In Case of Misfortune (1958), in which she appeared opposite screen icon Jean Gabin; The Truth (1960); Private Life (1962); A Ravishing Idiot (1964); Shalako (1968); Women (1969); The Bear and the Doll (1970); Rum Boulevard (1971); and Don Juan (1973).

After completing The Woman Grabber in 1973, Bardot retired from acting at the age of 39 and withdrew to her villa in St. Tropez on the French Riviera. On Sunday, as admirers left flowers outside her home, local authorities in St. Tropez appealed for “respect for the privacy of her family and the calm of the places where she lived.”

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