from his defense of animals to his crusade against Islam

And, although his legacy is insignificant today, His myth is full of lights and shadows. Even though she left the cinema more than fifty years ago, Bardot remained true to herself and was recognized for her fierce defense of the animal cause: “I don’t care about women, animals worry me much more,” she once declared.

“Owning a fur coat is like carrying a cemetery on your back,” he said in 1994 during an attack on the Italian star. Sophie Loren for accepting “blood money” to promote fur coats. “You highlight human misery,” he wrote to Pope Francis in 2017, “curiously privileging Muslim migration to the detriment of Christians in the Middle East, but more miserable than the fate of these people is that of animals.”

Her position on motherhood caused a sensation in France. She herself wrote during her pregnancy with her son Nicolas that it was “a tumor that was eating me from the inside”. After his birth, which he describes as a “nightmare”, Nicolas is raised by his father.

In 1971, the year she announced her retirement from cinema, to questions from the press about celebrity, Bardot replied “fame?” Let them put it on you! Regarding how she experienced her rise to the Olympus of cinema, the actress also said that she “tried to make herself as beautiful as possible” and that, despite this, “she looked ugly”. “I hated going out, I was afraid of not being what they expected of me. Now I don’t care,” he said on one occasion. “I always knew my career was based on my looks, so I decided to leave the cinema as I always left men.…Before they leave me.

The day he publicly supported Marine Le Pen

The most notable controversy occurred when in 2012 he wrote a letter in support of Marine Le Pen so that she could gain support and the National Front could participate in the 2012 elections. Regarding far-right politics, the actress assured that “she liked it a lot.” “She’s the only woman who has balls“, he said.

Le Pen herself, in a message on X, called the death of Brigitte Bardot an “immense loss”. “France has lost an exceptional woman, endowed with exceptional talent, courage, frankness and beauty,” he adds. “She was incredibly French: free, indomitable and pure of heart.”

In this sense, his statements once the 21st century arrived on immigration or on women were not free from criticism either. Asked about the impact of immigration in France, Brigitte Bardot He went so far as to say he was “against the Islamization of France”. “Our ancestors, grandparents, parents gave their lives for centuries to ward off invaders.”

In 2008, she was fined 15,000 euros in Paris for inciting racial hatred after writing, as reported by the BBC, a letter to Nicolas Sarkozy in which she claimed that Muslims were “those who destroy us, who destroy our country by imposing their practices on us”. This was the fifth time this had happened, but not the last. In 2021, a sixth fine was imposed on him, in the amount of 20,000 euros, for having written a letter in which he described the Reunionese as “savages”.

In all of them, the motivation was his rejection of Eid al-Adha, the festival of lamb sacrifice, which he called a “day of bloody mourning” and asked French authorities to do so on the condition that the animals be stunned before being sacrificed.