Brigitte Bardot, the French screen legend who walked away from the film industry to support animal rights and lead opposition to open borders and mass immigration, has died. She was 91.
The Guardian reports Paris-born Bardot shot to international fame with the 1956 film And God Created Woman, written and directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim.
For the next two decades she embodied the idea of the archetypal “sex kitten.”
Brigitte Bardot at a London Hotel during a photocall after arriving in from Paris to start location shooting for her latest movie “Babette Goes to War” (Photo by PA Images via Getty Images)
Portrait of Brigitte Bardot taken 1966 in Paris, France. (KEYSTONE-FRANCE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty)
Her work on screen was not to last – by personal choice.
The Guardian notes in the early 70s she announced her retirement from acting and became increasingly active politically.
Bardot’s outspoken support of animal rights evolved into comments about ethnic minorities and open support for France’s Front National, resulting in a string of convictions for racial hatred.
Acknowledged as a symbol of woman’s liberation, Bardot told Le Figaro in 2015 she was against the Muslim face veil.
“Communitarianism takes on too much importance. It is the culmination of thirty years of laxity.”
Brigitte Bardot on the set of “A Coeur Joie” (“Two Weeks in September”). (Photo by Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
A committed free speech activist, the actress faced trial five times between 1997 and 2008 for “inciting racial hatred” including for comments criticising mass Muslim immigration in France.
On one of these occasions, she was convicted for “decrying the loss of French identity and tradition due to the ‘multiplication of mosques while our church bells fall silent for want of priests’.”
She always maintained she simply respected the French way of life and sought to protect it and its inheritors.
Bardot was also a vocal opponent of Muslim halal slaughter, which often involves slaughtering an animal without stunning it, causing pain and distress before death.
Bruno Jacquelin, of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals, told the Associated Press she died at her home in southern France, and would not provide a cause of death.
Brigitte Bardot at the European Council to condemn the seal hunt in Strasbourg, France on January 24th, 1978. (Laurent MAOUS/Gamma-Rapho via Getty)
He said no arrangements have yet been made for funeral or memorial services.
Bardot had been hospitalized last month.
UPDATE: Wire service AFP gave this brief summation of how Bardot “tended to shoot from the hip”
On fame
– “Fame? You can shove it,” she said in 1971, a few years before she announced her retirement from cinema.
– “I tried to make myself as beautiful as possible and even then I found myself ugly. I hated going out. I was afraid of not being what people expected me to be. Today at my age I don’t give a damn.”
On men
– “I knew my career was based only on my looks, so I decided to leave movies the way I always left men — before they could leave me.”
– “I’ve always done what I wanted… I know I’ve got bigger balls than a lot of men. They could learn a lot from me.”
On motherhood
– “It was like a tumour that fed on me, that I carried in my afflicted flesh waiting for the blessed moment when they finally took it out of me,” she wrote of her pregnancy with her son Nicolas.
After the “nightmare” of his birth, “I had to take lifelong responsibility for the cause of my misery.”
(Nicolas was raised by his father).
On humanity
– “I don’t care about the condition of women. The condition of animals is far more preoccupying.”
– “I won’t hide my misanthropy! It exists and it is justified. Look at humanity, it is horrible.”
On animals
– “To possess a fur coat is to wear a cemetery on one’s back,” she said in a 1994 swipe at Italian star Sophia Loren for accepting “blood money” to promote fur coats.
– “You stress human misery,” she wrote to Pope Francis in 2017, “oddly favouring Muslim migration to the detriment of Christians from the Middle East, but more miserable than the fate of these people is that of animals.”
On Muslims
– “I am against the Islamisation of France! Our ancestors, our grandfathers, our fathers have for centuries given their lives to push out successive invaders.”
– “I like Marine (Le Pen, the leader of the French far-right) a lot. I won’t hide it. She is the only woman … who has balls.”
On #MeToo
“Lots of actresses try to play the tease with producers to get a role. And then, so we will talk about them, they say they were harassed. I found it charming when men told me I was beautiful or I had a nice little backside.”
More to come…
