The Tamesis
French screen star and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has reportedly died at her home in the south of France. She is 91 years old.
Admired for her sensual performances in films by Roger Vadim and Jean-Luc Godard as well as her uniquely eclectic fashion, Bardot remained a pop culture icon long after she retired from acting in 1973 at the age of 39. 2016, in Brigitte Bardot: my fashion lifeIn Flammarion’s visual memoir, Leslie Camhi talks to the 82-year-old star about her childhood, her lovers and her unique style.
She was kneeling in front of the dressing table with her back to us, her torso wrapped in a towel, her head tilted slightly to the side, her tiger cub-like nose and Cupid’s bow-like pout exposed under her thick golden mane. With one manicured hand, she held up a small mirror and gazed at her own image, like a Venus in an old master painting, but bathed in the glow of modern celebrity.
Fashion In March 1958, William Klein published a full-page photograph of 24-year-old Brigitte Bardot, accompanied by a brief article that mentioned the French star’s “greatest animal magnetism” and the four films she was showing simultaneously at New York’s Intelligent Cinema Art Theater. This is not a fashion photo – its subject is shown After Byrne Or just before the towel dropped, we might, at least in imagination, have her. The Summer of Love is still nearly ten years away. Yet despite her childish looks and deceptively delicate body, Bardot single-handedly represented a female sexual revolution.
“I’ve never been fashionable, so I’ll never go out of style,” she said in a rare interview at Villa La Madrague in Saint-Tropez, whose high walls are covered with bougainvillea and which has been her sanctuary for more than half a century. Although she is 82, has some fragile health and is notoriously reclusive, her deep, rich voice – colored perhaps by years of smoking – still conveys a surprising energy. Bardot’s charm lies, like a child’s, in her fierce devotion to the moment, her absolute lack of vanity and her directness. “I mean, I never followed fashion; I did it my own way. I was ahead of my time,” she says simply. “When you’re right too soon, you’re always wrong.”
Nothing in her orthodox middle-class childhood could have foreseen the arrival of the iconoclasts. Bardot was born in 1934 and grew up in a conservative Parisian family, the eldest of two daughters. “My parents were elegant and serious people who enjoyed interacting with social complexity,” she recalls. “There’s nothing bohemian about them.”
