A lifetime ago, Brigitte Bardot was the iconic French sex symbol who helped to define the sexual revolution of the last century. Today Bardot is 71, and when she makes headlines it is for rather different reasons. A self-confessed recluse who, she says, cares more for her dogs than her husband, Bardot cuts an eccentric public figure.
The star whose lifestyle and dress seemed to her 1950s audiences shockingly, impossibly risqué now focuses her energies on animal welfare and making controversial political pronouncements.
Born in Paris in 1934, the daughter of a well-to-do industrialist, Bardot was just 14 when she met Roger Vadim, the film director credited with inventing the Bardot myth in 1956 in his film And God Created Woman, in which his young protégé lounged naked and pouting on a beach.
But Bardot’s marriage to Vadim was troubled by her unhappiness with her public image — she later recalled being called a tart by a stranger on the street. A second marriage in 1959 to the actor Jacques Charrier fared little better. Three decades later, in her autobiography, Bardot attacked Charrier, claiming that he was a drunk who forced her to become pregnant with a child that “fed off my body like a tumour”. In court, Charrier said the portrait of their marriage was wildly inaccurate.
When her marriage to Charrier collapsed in 1962 Bardot fled to the South of France and attempted suicide. A string of lovers followed, including the singer Serge Gainsbourg. There was a short-lived marriage to Gunther Sachs, heir to the Opel car fortune.
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Bardot was only 40 when she announced her retirement in 1974, and her intention to exist “only to serve the suffering animals of the world”. Since then past friends have spoken of a wilful descent into weirdness. Her 1992 marriage to Bernard D’Ormale, an associate of the far-Right political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, says a lot about her political sensibilities. In her 2003 book, A Scream in the Silence, Bardot complained of a “Muslim invasion” in France. The French courts saw fit to convict her for incitement to racial hatred.
She is unrepentant, telling a German magazine this month: “I don’t give a damn what people think of me.” She seems to mean it.
Still, in D’Ormale Bardot has at last found what has eluded her for so long: a lasting match. Asked how she could claim more intimacy with her dogs than her husband, her answer was simple: “You know what? I was always the man in my life.”