Iconic 1960s Actress Brigitte Bardot Looks Transformed At 90

Nov 12, 2020

At 90, Brigitte Bardot looks near unrecognizable from her days as an international movie star. Her iconic role in 1956's And God Created Woman saw her instantly shoot to fame. 

After numerous other successes, Bardot retired from acting in 1973 to focus on her activism for animal rights, something she has been doing for the past 47 years.

According to Biography, Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born on September 28th, 1934, in Paris, France, to a wealthy upper-middle-class family. As France Today writes, her father was an industrialist and part-time amateur filmmaker on the side, while her mother was interested in fashion and ballet. Like her mom, Bardot was also interested in ballet. As a teenager, she studied ballet at the National Superior Conservatory of Paris for Music and Dance.

The family lived a lavish life. Besides extravagant holidays spent in the Alps, on the Atlantic coast, Saint-Tropez and the like, their regular life involved rotating their time between their apartment on the Rue de la Pompe, in the elegant 16th arrondissement of Paris, and then to their cottage in Louveciennes, west of Paris on the weekends. 

Despite their riches, Bardot's parents did not spoil her or her sister.

 "My parents gave me a strict upbringing, which at times has caused me to suffer distress but today I am grateful to them for it," she said.

In her biography, Bardot writes about an incident when she and her sister accidentally broke a Chinese vase when they were young children, which ended in the girls receiving beatings from their parents. Bardot was affectionately nicknamed "BB" from her initials—reminiscent of bébé, which is French for "baby."

The nickname proved apt as she catapulted to fame for portraying sexually emancipated personae in the 1960s, including her role in And God Created Woman. Bardot was 22 years old at that time. Bardot's first marriage was to Roger Vadim, the very man that shot Bardot to fame as the director of And God Created Woman. 

According to The New York Times, Bardot was just 16 years old when they met. They married in 1952 when Vadim was 24 years old and Bardot 18. The actress's strict parents were against their relationship at first as Bardot was underage. But her parents eventually let them pursue the relationship, although they did not allow her to get married until she turned 18.

Throughout their marriage, Vadim remained an avid admirer of Bardot as an actress. According to The New York Times, of her role in And Got Created Woman, he said: 

"I wanted to show a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved in the way a boy might, without any sense of guilt on a moral or sexual level."

 The couple would eventually divorce five years later in 1957. Vadim died aged 72 in 2000 after losing his battle with cancer.

After her success in And God Created Woman, Bardot appeared in many other films including movies that were marketed towards a foreign audience. These included Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris, Louis Malle's Viva Maria!, a Hollywood movie that centers on fictional imaging of her titled Dear Brigitte, and her penultimate film, which saw her reunite with Roger Vadim, Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman. Meanwhile, some of her co-stars included Hollywood heartthrobs James Stewart, Anthony Perkins, and Sean Connery, among the many French leading men she worked with. 

Alongside her blossoming acting career, Bardot also began to record music, working mostly with French singer Serge Gainsbourg. She recorded several albums of music throughout the '60s and '70s.

Bardot went on to star in more films and even had the opportunity to meet with Queen Elizabeth and fellow global icon, Marilyn Monroe: "I find her wonderful," Bardot said of Monroe. "She’s a woman who was exploited whom no one understood. I think that’s what eventually killed her." But in 1973, at the height of her career, she abandoned her stardom to dedicate her life to animal rights activism, according to The Guardian. On giving up her life as a highly successful actress, Bardot said:

“The majority of great actresses met tragic ends. When I said goodbye to this job, to this life of opulence and glitter, images and adoration, the quest to be desired, I was saving my life.”

She goes on to describe being a celebrity as "suffocating." In her book Tears of Battle: An Animal Rights Memoir, Bardot says humans inflict suffering and evil upon themselves for their own selfish needs and writes about how she found peace with animals and nature. 

Clearly committed to her new life's pursuit to help animals, Bardot had seemed to turn a new leaf. She once said: 

"I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals."

In 1986, she founded the La Fondation Brigitte Bardot (FBB). According to their website, the FBB fights against wild animals' captivity, the cruelty of fur, hunting, poaching, blood sports, whaling, and seal hunting, amongst other things. In February 2019, Bardot talked of the achievements of her foundation, saying:

"We have financed the construction of a wild animal hospital in Chile, as well as a park to care for mistreated bears in Bulgaria, for koalas in Australia, for elephants in Thailand, and for horses in Tunisia. If the foundation wasn't active, a great many species conservation programs would be non-existent."

In 2015, the former actress even wrote a letter to Karl Lagerfeld's cat, Choupette, "asking" her to make her owner aware of animals' plight in the fur trade.

"It was my way of highlighting Karl Lagerfeld's incoherence," she said. "He bends over backwards for his cat but doesn't care an ounce for all the animals sacrificed for his collections, for this most futile and vulgar of fashions. Fur is not luxury: it is an industry of death and suffering. We must boycott fur coats, as well as all the accessories."

And while Bardot might be best remembered for her acting work and later on her dedication to animals, it would be remiss to not touch on her dynamic love life that included some of the world's most handsome men. After all, she was the actress that popularized the sex kitten ideal.

It was reported that the breakup of her marriage to Roger Vadim, which ended in 1957, was due to two affairs she had with other men. One of the men was her And God Created Woman co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant, whom Bardot lived with for two years, although they never married.

Following their breakup, the actress dated another actor, Jacques Charrier, who she went on to marry and who fathered her only child, a son named Nicolas-Jacques Charrier. After their divorce in 1962, her son lived with his father's side of the family and didn't have much to do with Bardot until he was an adult. 

Her third marriage was to a German millionaire named Gunter Sachs, who was a playboy himself. After this, she was reported to have dated a string of men including American actors Glenn Ford and Warren Beatty, and her frequent collaborator, French musician Serge Gainsbourg. She married a fourth time in 1992 to Bernard d'Ormale, a political advisor, and the two are still together.

Her fluid relationship with men became her signature and regarding the many affairs she had, she once said, "It is better to be unfaithful than to be faithful without wanting to be." Nevertheless, her dedication to love wasn't something she took lightly. She commented:

"When I love, I do it without counting. I give myself entirely. And each time, it is the grand love of my life."

Enriching popular culture with her very being, Bardot left behind a large contribution to fashion and style. Always a perfect image of grace and sex appeal, Brigitte Bardot's influence on global style cannot be denied. Her status as a sex symbol led to her popularizing the bikini, which at the time was acceptable in France but still considered risqué in the United States. The so-called Bardot neckline—where both shoulders are exposed along with a wide-open neckline—is named after her, while her hairstyles also created trends. 

There is also the Bardot pose, which has been mimicked time and again in fashion editorials. She once commented, "A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you." Well, lucky she immortalized her beauty and youth when one year after retiring from acting, Bardot posed nude in a Playboy photoshoot that celebrated her 40th birthday. 

Whether through her fashion sense, acting and musical talents, dedication to animals, or her many love affairs, both on-screen and off—which served to open up a new narrative for women around the world, giving them more personal freedom in how a woman should act—Brigitte Bardot is a true icon. Despite her rather short career in the spotlight, her influence has been profound, and continues to this day, even at the age of 90.

Are you a fan of Brigitte Bardot? Did you know how influential she's been throughout her life and career? Let us know your thoughts about the actress in the comments and be sure to pass this along so more people can learn about Bardot's activism for animal rights.