The Three Lives of Brigitte Bardot

The news was reported by the French news agency AFP, along with a statement from the Brigitte Bardot Foundation. “The Brigitte Bardot Foundation announces with immense sadness the death of its founder and president, Mrs. Brigitte Bardot, a world-famous actress and singer, who decided to leave her prestigious career to dedicate her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation," the statement said.

As one of the first creators of the celebrity cult, Brigitte Bardot masterfully harnessed the energy of the “roaring sixties,” positioning herself as a free-spirited embodiment of a changing world. Brigitte Bardot (or BB, as everyone called her) starred in 47 films and several musicals, recorded an album with Serge Gainsbourg and she became, according to the words Charles de Gaulle, “a French export as important as Renault's cars.” At the height of her fame, in 1973, she turned her back on film and devoted herself entirely to her cause: animal rights.

Born a brunette in 1934 (she dyed her hair blonde in 1965 for an Italian film) My son Nero), daughter Big Year i Luja Bardo She grew up in a wealthy family home in Paris, attended private schools three times a week, and danced ballet twice a week. Later, at the Paris Conservatory, she danced for three years in the class of a Russian choreographer Boris Knyazev.

At the age of 15, after appearing on the cover of Elle magazine, Brigitte Bardot was noticed by the director Roger Vadim, who convinced Mark Alegre to invite her to audition for The laurels are cut.. Although she did not get the part, it was a turning point: she developed an interest in acting and fell in love with Vadim. When her parents forbade the relationship, Bardot reacted with the first of her four suicide attempts; and later in life she struggled with severe depression. Her parents eventually relented, but they forbade the couple from marrying until she turned 18, which they did in 1952.

Although they divorced four years later, after she had an affair with a fellow actor. Jean-Louis Trentinian, it was her relationship with Vadim that launched her into world stardom. For her directorial debut, And God created woman, Vadim intended for Bardot the role of Juliette, a lively, seductive teenager who is stifled by the small town she lives in. The film was poorly received by the conservative part of the French public, who were particularly enraged by a scene in which Brigitte Bardot, with her hair disheveled and loose, dances barefoot.

In America, the film was received with rapture (“I owe everything to the Americans,” she once said). The fiercely physically expressive French actress was in complete agreement with the spirit of the times, as she brought a boldness of body to the rigidity of the 1950s. “It is not what Miss Bardot does in bed, but what she could do that drives the three male leads to erotic madness,” wrote a New York Times critic. Bosli Herbs"She is a being of moving contours, a phenomenon that you have to see to believe."

However, Brigitte Bardot's influence went far beyond the world of film criticism. She is credited with introducing the bikini into fashion. Often photographed in striped "Breton" shirts on the French Riviera, for her second husband, Jacques Charrier, she got married in a dress made of pink plaid material, and the look was immediately adopted by countless women, and even a type of neckline was named after her. As a muse Andy Warhol, she invented the "Bardo pose", which was later imitated Monica Bellucci i The Makferson, when the model is photographed in black tights with her arms crossed over her chest.

young John Lennon i Paul McCartney adored her and even planned to make a film in which Bardot would appear alongside the Beatles, and he was equally fascinated by her and Bob DylanAccording to the liner notes from his first album, he dedicated the first song he ever wrote to her.

In fact, Brigitte Bardot's influence on popular culture was so enormous that Raymond Cartier, then editor of the magazine Pari Mac, in 1958 requested a thoroughly researched eight-page text on the “Bardo case,” engaging psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists to decipher the power of her influence.

Brigitte Bardot also attracted the attention of a group of French intellectuals, intrigued by the political implications of her subversive beauty. Her open sexuality was regularly attacked as a moral corruption, as something that eroded the very fabric of French society. She later claimed to have had more than 100 lovers, including women.

Simon de Beauvoir In her 1959 essay “The Lolita Syndrome,” she called Brigitte Bardot “the locomotive of women’s history,” presenting her as the first liberated woman of postwar France. “The naturalness of Brigitte Bardot seems more perverse than any elegance,” she wrote. “To despise jewels, makeup, and high heels, as she does, is to refuse to make yourself an idol. It is to assert equality with men… and that is precisely what makes her so dangerous in the eyes of society.”

And then, in a stunning act of defiance, just before her 40th birthday (which she marked with a nude photoshoot for Playboy), Brigitte Bardot retired from acting, preserving her on-screen image as eternally youthful. “I was really sick of it,” she told Vanity Fair. “It’s a good thing I stopped, because the same thing would have happened to me.” Marilyn Monroe i Romy Schneider".

Declining roles with Frank Sinatra i Steve Mekvin as partners, as well as a million dollar check to play with Marlon Brando, she closed the door on Hollywood. “I live a farm life,” she said in an interview with The Guardian, titled “I Can’t Wear Lagerfeld While Feeding Goats.”

In her autobiography, “Initials BB,” published on her 62nd birthday, she described how she struggled behind the facade of ideals she had been molded into: that of a liberated, confident “sexy pussy.” “When you go through moments as intense as I did, the bill always comes due,” she wrote. Reflecting on her multiple suicide attempts, she said, “You can’t escape the despair that accompanies great happiness.”

One of those attempts came shortly after the birth of her son, Nicholas; she didn't want the pregnancy, she said, but she was persuaded to keep the child. "I'm not old enough," she said at the time. "I know it's a terrible thing to admit, but I'm not old enough to take care of a child." Her public questioning of motherhood and marriage sparked public outrage, and in the process irreparably damaged her relationship with her son.

Shifting her focus to animal rights, Brigitte Bardot tirelessly wrote and sent letters, pressuring politicians with her pen. Former Chinese President Jiang Cemin In 1999, she received a particularly scathing letter, published in the French magazine VSD, accusing the Chinese of torturing bears and killing the last remaining tigers and rhinos to make aphrodisiacs. More recently, she wrote an open letter to a fluffy cat. Karl Lagerfeld named Shupe, encouraging her to try to convince the fashion designer to stop using fur.

While opposing the slaughter of horses, the killing of baby seals in Canada, industrial animal farming, bullfighting, and hunting, Brigitte Bardot also auctioned off many of her personal items, including precious stones given to her by her third husband, a German millionaire, to raise money for the animals. Gunter Zak, to whom she had been briefly married for three years since 1966. (“I never go back to the past, the memories are too negative,” she explained to Vanity Fair.) Their divorce was not acrimonious, and after Bardot sold her ring, Sachs managed to track it down and return it to his ex-wife. It was said that she was deeply affected by his suicide at the age of 79 in a chalet in Gstaad.

Brigitte Bardot's passion for animals was eccentric: in 2015, she forced François Hollande to grant a “presidential amnesty” to hundreds of wild Alpine mountain goats slated for cull due to the disease. But, given her delicate mental health and turbulent personal and professional lives, this eccentricity was rooted in something far more painful. “Animals have never betrayed me,” she once explained. “They are easy prey, just as I have been throughout my career. That’s why we feel the same way. I love them.”

Brigitte Bardot moved to Saint-Tropez in 1958 and transformed the previously tranquil seaside region into a prestigious jet-set destination. Indeed, after she rejected Sachs’s first proposal, he hired a helicopter to shower her house, La Madrag, with hundreds of red roses. “It’s not every day that a man throws a ton of roses into your backyard,” she wrote in “Initials BB.”

She lived in La Madrago with her fourth and last husband, Bernard d'Ormal, a former National Front advisor, whom she married in 1992. The couple apparently shared political leanings. In an interview with Paris Match in 2014, Brigitte Bardot described the leader of the far-right party as Marine Le Pen as the “Joan of Arc of the 21st century,” and then urged voters not to support Emanuel Macron in the French elections, saying that his lack of empathy for animals could be seen in the "coldness of his steely gaze."

Brigitte Bardot was convicted for the fifth time in 2008 for spreading racial hatred after sending a letter Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, expressing her opposition to the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, which traditionally involves the slaughter of a sheep. “I am fed up with living under the pressure of this population that is destroying us, destroying our country and imposing its will,” she wrote in a letter that was later published by her foundation. After being fined 15.000 euros, the prosecutor said she was tired of bringing charges against Brigitte Bardot for such acts.

Two years later, Bardot lashed out at the director To Kyle Newman, who planned to make a biopic about her, was apparently inspired by the intertwining of fantasy and reality that defined her story, as well as the gap between her public image and the reality of who she was: bold, imperfect, and unwavering. “Wait until I’m dead before you make a movie about my life,” she warned, “or feathers will fly.”

(Glif editorial office; source: Vog; translation: M. Jovandić)