Brigitte Bardot, French film 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 Sunday at her home in southern France. She was 91.

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

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.

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.

Few of 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, Bardot never worked in the United States.

When Bardot announced her retirement from films in 1973, she had already begun her work on behalf of animal rights and welfare. But it was only in 1986, a year after she was made a chevalier of France’s Legion of Honour, that she created the Foundation 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 jewellery and other personal belongings to ensure the foundation’s financial base.

In recent decades, 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 bestseller 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.

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 modelling as a teenager and appeared on the cover of Elle magazine at 15.

Bardot 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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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