Brigitte Bardot, the international sex goddess of cinema in the 1950s and '60s, has died aged 91. Bardot's animal rights foundation announced her death in a statement to news agency Agence France-Presse on Sunday, without specifying the time or place of death.
Stylish and seductive, Bardot exuded a kind of free sexuality, rare in the buttoned-up 1950s. She modeled, made movies, influenced fashion around the world and recorded albums. She married four times. Her list of lovers famously included Warren Beatty, Nino Ferrer and singer-songwriter-producer Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she recorded the French hit Bonnie and Clyde.
Bardot's look was copied by women around the world, says Claire Schub who teaches French literature and film at Tufts University.
"Her fashion choices, her hair, her makeup, her pout ... She became this icon, this legend, all over the globe," says Schub.
But her image changed in her later years. Bardot was found guilty multiple times in her native France of "inciting racial hatred," mainly for comments attacking Muslims.
As an actor, Bardot worked with some of France's leading directors including Henri-Georges Clouzot in La Vérité (The Truth), Jean-Luc Godard in Le Mépris (Contempt) and Louis Malle in Viva Maria!
Born Catholic to an upper-middle-class couple in Paris in 1934, Bardot studied ballet and modeled before becoming an actor. As a teenager, she appeared several times on the cover of Elle magazine, attracting the attention of Roger Vadim who was six years her senior. The two married in 1952. Bardot's parents made them wait until she turned 18.
Vadim, an aspiring director, has been credited with turning Bardot into the iconic sex symbol she became. In his 1957 film And God Created Woman, Bardot plays a provocative young woman on a quest for sexual liberation.
Vadim wanted Bardot's appearances in his films to shake off sexual taboos. He once said that he wanted to "kill the myth, this odd rule in Christian morality, that sex must be coupled with guilt."
The New York Times panned the film but wrote that Bardot "moves herself in a fashion that fully accentuates her charms. She is undeniably a creation of superlative craftsmanship."
The media savvy Vadim made sure Bardot appeared often in the French press. Not that it took much convincing — Bardot's alluring images helped sell both magazines and movie tickets. "To be fair, if Vadim discovered and manufactured me," Bardot once said, "I created Vadim."
Bardot's liberating sexuality
While she was one of France's best known exports, she wasn't always beloved at home. She was often ridiculed by critics who derided her acting even as they gushed over her body.
Reviewing the 1959 film Babette Goes to War, in which Bardot does not bare all, one critic wrote, "In deciding not to reveal her body, Brigitte Bardot wanted to unveil only her talent. Alas, we saw nothing."
Despite the misogynistic comments and constant scrutiny of her private life, Bardot's popularity coincided with changing attitudes about sex. French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir took note of France's love-hate relationship with Bardot's sexual appetite.
"In the game of love, she is as much hunter as she is prey," de Beauvoir wrote in her 1959 essay for Esquire, "Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome."
Bardot was hounded by the paparazzi, suffered from depression and attempted suicide. "What I rejected the most during my life as an actress was the limelight," she wrote in her autobiography, "That intense focus...ate at me from the inside."
After starring in dozens of movies, Bardot retired from acting in 1973. She started an animal rights foundation.
Convicted for 'inciting racial hatred'
In her later years, Bardot became notorious for her racist and homophobic comments and her association with France's far right. Her fourth husband, Bernard d'Ormale, was an aide to Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front party.
In her 2003 book, Un Cris dans le Silence, she disparages immigrants, gays, French schools and contemporary art. She called Muslims "invaders" and railed against the killing of animals in the name of religion. She apologized in court in 2004 but also doubled down on what she called the "infiltration" of France by Islamic extremists.
In her biography of Bardot, author and French film scholar Ginette Vincendeau writes "the high priestess of freedom resents almost everyone else's rights to exercise it."
Bardot, the stunning, desirable beauty who once stood for sexual freedom for women, spent the latter part of her life at her home near Saint Tropez with her husband and a menagerie of pets.
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