“A free woman is the opposite of an easy woman.” This is what the man who dynamited European cinema said, the one who changed the way the world understands sensuality, freedom and impudence. From muse to myth, from actress to activistBrigitte Bardot (Paris, 1934) reinvents the figure of the star. Today, his death closes the most brilliant chapter in French culture.
The Parisian died at the age of 91, as his foundation reported this Sunday in a press release. With her departure, the one who embodied the most modern sensuality disappears. Bardot, it’s an earthquake that undermined moral standards of European culture. It was truly indomitable.
It happened in Paris, in 1934, and in a sober and regimented Europe, where a girl was born who grew up under a harsh education in the middle of a bourgeois family from the interior of France. This childhood, confined between the rigidity of classical dance classes and implacable discipline, promised a well-controlled, regulated, conventional life.
But at 15, the young woman with the provocative look became a model. Its impact was immediate: it was not a classic beauty, but an insolent strength in its freshness and an absolutely uninhibited sweetness.
Everything for ‘BB’
Bardot became world famous in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to carefree performances and their sexual magnetism in a series of films. Usually box office successes, although they did not always have critical support. His breakthrough role came when he was just 22 in the 1956 film And God created womandirected by Roger Vadim, who propelled her to international stardom.
Scene from “And God Created Woman”.
He thus inspired the new filmmakers of New wavewho saw in her the face of a modern and unapologetic France. Jean-Luc Godard immortalized her in Contempt (1963) as the embodiment of intellectualized sensuality.
Her beauty and charisma made her an erotic symbol of the timewho became known for his distinctive style and signature blonde hair. Cinema had discovered a new woman and nothing would ever be the same again.
The artist achieved the status of the most famous woman in her country. Even President Charles De Gaulle had to admit it.: “Brigitte Bardot brings more foreign currency to France than Renault,” he declared.
The artist in a scene from “The Truth”.
It has also been the subject of intellectual essays such as Simone de Beauvoir from 1959, Lolita syndromein the French magazine Modern times —that the philosopher directed with Jean-Paul Sartre—describes her as a “locomotive of women’s history” and draws on existentialist themes to declare her the most liberated in France.
Beauvoir writes the text just when Bardot becomes a global erotic symboland what interests him is what this represents for the modern female figure.
He called her “girl who becomes a woman without ceasing to be a girl“: a being who oscillates between innocence and provocation, who escapes the rules, but without yet becoming an adult in the traditional sense.
As a singer, she released several albums during this period, add up to 70 songs. Additionally, she has become a muse for icons of the song like Serge Gainsbourg, who composed songs like harley-davidson And I love you… me neitherfurthering the sexual revolution that would define the next decade.
Bardot syndrome
If young people around the world imitated in those years —in poses and clothing— to James Dean and Marlon Brando, they did the same when seeing the Frenchwoman walking on the beaches of Saint-Tropez and Cannes the bikini created by fashion designer Louis Réard.
He has inspired generations of artists and designers, Andy Warhol to Paco Rabanne– that they saw in her something more than an actress or a muse. The first represented her as if she were a pop deitya face that condensed the tension between innocence and desire. In her screen prints, she appears like a European Marilyn: less manufactured, more wild.
But the second understood it from another angle: for him, it represented the woman of the futurethe one who didn’t ask permission to be free, the one who could wear metal, leather or cotton with the same insolence. For her, fashion becomes a manifesto.
Brigitte Bardot posing in a metallic bra.
His image, a mixture of naivety and provocation, marked a new aesthetic which merged the natural and the sophisticated. She was, basically, the perfect synthesis of the 60s: sensuality, beauty and an attitude that invited disobedience in style.
It has also become fashionable the famous Bardot neckline -in films like Pick the daisy (1956) —, bare shoulders, which reinvents itself over the years. In any case, by the mid-19th century she was already the favorite of royalty, with the Spaniard Eugenia de Montijo being one of her main defenders.
The artist and activist wears a top with the aforementioned cleavage.
Few women can boast of having given a name to such an old trend which still continues today. fill looks with sensuality.
Brigitte Bardot with one of her classic looks.
Likewise, flat ballerinas, checked shirts and ginghamthe scarf and disheveled hair, symbols of a free and natural femininity which broke with the sophisticated ideal of the time imposed by major fashion houses like Dior.
From muse to activist
In September of this year, Bardot presented a handwritten book between 2020 and 2025, My BBcedar (Fayard), which its editorial presented as “an immersion in the personality of a woman who marked her time with her independence, her commitment and her audacity”.
The publication presents an alphabet of life in which each letter opens a door to memoriesopinions, loves and indignations.
He claims the freedom to be yourself and also reveals her hidden wounds, recounting the reasons that led her to four suicide attempts in the 1950s, at the height of her fame. In these pages, he recounts the anguish of those years when, despite the success of his projects, he no longer found meaning in his life.
‘La Madrague, it’s me’
In 1973, while she was still at the top, Brigitte Bardot decided to leave the cinema, flashes and fame. “I feel like a prisoner of myself“, he admitted.
From this suffering was born a rebirth which found its place in the world thanks to animal protection: “By giving them my life, they saved me. They brought me the truth, true love.”
His foundation, created in 1986, allowed him rebuild your life away from sets filming and the spotlights. A rare act of self-determination in a star of this caliber, completely changing the scenario that others expected.
In her private life, she behaved without ties, without following social conventions, loving and leaving men at will. It is said that he had up to 100 lovers and married four times.
From 1973 he retired to the south of Francebecoming an international symbol of Saint-Tropez, transforming a fishing port into the epicenter of global glamor and making the south of France the new stage of European desire.
He transformed his private mansion, La Madragueat her organization’s headquarters, where she lived surrounded by more than a thousand rescued animals.
His house was as famous in France as Versailles. Thus, Bardot channeled her worldwide fame towards a new mission in 1986by establishing the foundation that bears his name there.
Thanks to his prestige, he managed to make subjects like seal hunting, bullfighting and animal exploitation in laboratories and circuses will be on the international public agenda. His fight, he says, was not easy: “I lost friends and money, but I won a cause: that of animals.”
Brigitte Bardot showing a poster from one of her activist campaigns.
His activism too was accompanied by controversies. She has been fined several times for hate speech due to her public statements against immigration.
In one of his last confessions he emphasized sadness following the death of his great friend, Alain Delonand the loss of his dog ET. However, he was provocative: “I’m very lucky because I have a fiery temperament. It’s difficult to bring me down.”
But even the big stars disappear. And there you have it, at 91 years old, Brigitte Bardot’s light goes out. The woman who She unleashes passions, shakes up codes and transforms the idea of feminine freedom. She ends her last act on the stage of her own world, at La Madrague, surrounded by the animals she has chosen to protect.
“I was very happy, very rich, very beautiful, very flattered, very famous… and very unhappy“, he revealed one day. And in these words his whole life is condensed: a burst of genius, desire and contradiction.
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