Brigitte Bardot, the French actress idealized for her beauty and heralded in the middle of the century as the prototype of liberated female sexuality, has died at the age of 91.
Long retired from the entertainment industry, Bardot died at her home in the south of France, Bruno Jacquelin of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Protection of Animals confirmed to the Associated Press. He did not give any cause of death. Bardot had dealt with health issues in recent years, including hospitalization for a respiratory issue in July 2023 and additional hospital stays in 2025.
Bardot was known for being flighty, self-destructive, and prone to reckless love affairs with men and women. She was a fashion icon and media darling who gave up acting at age 39 and lived the rest of her years in near reclusion, emerging periodically to defend animal rights, lecture on moral decay, and defend bigoted political views.
And, as if in protest of her famous beauty, Bardot happily allowed herself to age naturally.
“For me, life consists only of the best and the worst, of love and hate,” he told The Guardian in 1996. “Everything that happened to me was excessive.”
In her prime, Bardot was considered a national treasure in France, welcomed by President Charles de Gaulle at the Elysee Palace and analyzed exhaustively by existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. She was the girl whose poster adorned a teenage John Lennon's bedroom.
While Marilyn Monroe was shy, Bardot was frank and free about her sexuality, unapologetically sleeping with her subjects, sweating and writhing barefoot on a table in the controversial 1956 film “…And God Created Woman.” Although many of her films were largely forgettable, she projected a radical sense of self-empowerment for women that had a lasting cultural influence.
Born on September 28, 1934 in Paris, the daughter of a Parisian factory owner and his socialite wife, Bardot and her younger sister were raised in a religious Catholic home.
Bardot studied ballet at the Paris Conservatory and, at the urging of her mother, took up modeling. At the age of 14, she appeared on the cover of Elle magazine. She caught the attention of filmmaker Marc Allegret, who sent his 20-year-old apprentice, Roger Vadim, to look for her.
Vadim and Bardot began a years-long relationship during which he cultivated the sex kitten persona that would seduce the world. But Bardot was not someone who allowed herself to be cultivated. As Vadim once said: “She doesn't act. She exists.”
Bardot married Vadim at age 18 and that same year he directed her in “…And God Created Woman,” as a woman who falls in love with her older husband's younger brother. The film, which sparked moral outrage in the United States and was heavily edited before reaching theaters, made Bardot a star and an emblem of French modernity.
“I wanted to show a normal young woman whose only difference was that she behaved as a child would, without any feeling of guilt on a moral or sexual level,” Vadim said at the time.
In real life, Bardot left Vadim for her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant. She then mastered the comic-erotic character in the popular 1957 comedy “Une Parisienne” and played a young delinquent in the 1958 drama “Love Is My Profession.”
In 1959, she was pregnant with the son of French actor Jacques Charrier, whom she married as a result. Together they had a son, Nicolás.
In her scathing 1996 memoir, “Initials BB: Mémoires,” Bardot details her crude attempts to abort the child, asking doctors for morphine and punching herself in the stomach. Nine months after the baby was born, she said, she drank a bottle of sleeping pills and slit her wrists, the first of several apparent suicide attempts during her life. When Bardot recovered, she relinquished custody of her son and divorced Charrier.
“I couldn't be the root of Nicolás because I was completely uprooted, unbalanced, lost in that crazy world,” she explained years later.
Bardot scored her biggest box office success in the 1960 noir drama “The Truth,” playing a woman on trial for the murder of her lover. Her best performance probably came in Jean-Luc Godard's acclaimed 1963 melancholy adaptation, “Contempt,” as a wife who falls in love with her husband. She was later nominated for a BAFTA Award for her portrayal of a circus performer turned political operative in the 1965 comedy “Viva María!”
Meanwhile, Bardot sought drama and lived large.
While married to German industrialist Gunter Sachs, she had an affair with French pop star Serge Gainsbourg. He wrote Bardot the erotic love song “Je t'aime… moi non plus”, which became a hit for Donna Summer, modified and retitled “Love to Love You Baby”. By 1969, she had divorced Sachs and was romantically linked to everyone from Warren Beatty to Jimi Hendrix.
The celebrity life eventually wore on Bardot, and she came to fear that she would end up dying young like Marilyn Monroe or withering in the public eye like Rita Hayworth. Although he radiated confidence, he admitted in his memoir that he struggled with depression while trying to juggle the many moving parts of his chaotic life.
“Most great actresses met tragic ends,” he told The Guardian. “When I said goodbye to this job, to this life of opulence and glitter, of images and adoration, of the pursuit of being desired, I was saving my life.”
Nearing 40, he gave up acting and spent the rest of his life bouncing between his beach house in Saint-Tropez and a farm (with a chapel) outside Paris. She was dedicated to the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals.
As an animal rights activist, his list of enemies was long: the Japanese for hunting whales, the Spanish for bullfighting, the Russians for killing seals, furriers, hunters and circus operators.
In his home in Saint-Tropez, dozens of cats and dogs, as well as goats, sheep and a horse, roamed freely. She chased away fishermen and was sued for sterilizing a neighbor's goat.
“My chickens are the happiest in the world because I have been a vegetarian for 20 years,” Bardot said.
In 1985 he received the Legion of Honor, France's highest civilian decoration, but refused to collect it until President François Mitterrand agreed to close the royal hunting grounds.
In 1992 she married Bernard d'Ormale, a former aide to Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France's far-right National Front and frequent candidate for the French presidency. Bardot later became an ardent supporter of Marine, the daughter of Le Pen, a leader of France's anti-immigration far-right.
Two French civil rights groups sued Bardot over xenophobic and homophobic comments she made in her 2003 book, “A Cry in the Silence,” in which she criticized Muslims, gays, intellectuals, drug addicts, female politicians, illegal immigrants and unemployed “professionals.” Ultimately, she was fined six times for inciting racial hatred, primarily while speaking against Muslims and Jews. She was fined again in 2021 for a 2019 rant in which she called residents of Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, “degenerate savages.”
“I've never had a problem saying what I need to say,” Bardot wrote in a 2010 letter to the Times. “As for being a bunny who never says a word, that's really the opposite of me.”
Bardot sparked controversy again in 2018 when she dismissed the #MeToo movement as a campaign fueled by “man-hatred.”
“I thought it was nice to be told I was beautiful or that I had a nice little butt,” she told NBC. “This kind of compliment is nice.”
He stood firm in those views in the last year of his life, denouncing the social shame of playwright, comedian and actor Nicolas Bedos and actor Gérard Depardieu, both convicted of sexual assault. “Talented people who grab a girl's butt are thrown into the deep end,” he declared in a 2025 television interview, his first in 11 years. “At least we could let them continue living.”
As she aged, Bardot kept to herself, content to solve the crossword puzzle when the newspaper arrived, tend to her animal collection, and mail ardent written pleas to world leaders to stop animal abuse. She was very vague when asked if she was still married to D'Ormale.
“Depends on what day it is,” he said, laughing softly.
Piccalo is a former Times staff writer. Former staff writer Steve Marble contributed to this report.
