Brigitte Bardot

Brigitte Bardot (born September 28, 1934, Paris, France) is a French film actress who became an international sex symbol in the 1950s and ’60s.

Bardot was born to wealthy bourgeois parents, and at the age of 15 she posed for the cover of Elle (May 8, 1950), France’s leading women’s magazine. Roger Vadim, an aspiring director, was impressed and shrewdly fashioned her public and screen image as an erotic child of nature—blond, sensuous, and amoral. In two motion pictures directed by Vadim—Et Dieu créa la femme (1956; And God Created Woman) and Les Bijoutiers du claire de lune (1958; “The Jewelers of Moonlight”; Eng. title The Night Heaven Fell)—Bardot broke contemporary film taboos against nudity and set box office records in Europe and the United States. (Bardot was married to Vadim from 1952 to 1957.)

Bardot was the darling of disaffected French leftists, to whom she symbolized an artless disregard for conventional morality. Of her many films the most notable are Vie privée (1962; “The Private Life,” A Very Private Affair), Le Mépris (1963; Contempt), Viva Maria! (1965), Dear Brigitte (1965), and Masculin-Féminin (1966; Masculine Feminine). With her career waning, Bardot appeared in her final films in 1973 and subsequently retired.

An outspoken animal rights activist, she established (1987) an animal welfare organization, the Foundation Brigitte Bardot. In later years she garnered attention for a series of controversial remarks that resulted in her being fined on several occasions for inciting racial hatred. Notably, in 2004 Bardot was convicted for comments made about Muslims in her book Un Cri dans le silence (2003; “A Scream in the Silence”).