French movie star and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died at age 91, her foundation said Sunday.
"The Brigitte Bardot Foundation announces with immense sadness the death of its founder and president, Madame Brigitte Bardot, a world-renowned actress and singer, who chose to abandon her prestigious career to dedicate her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation," it said in a statement sent to French news agency AFP.
The foundation's Bruno Jacquelin told The Associated Press Bardot died at her home in southern France. He did not give a cause of death and said no immediate arrangements have been made for funeral or memorial services.
When her career began in the 1950s, she was widely regarded as a sex symbol, thanks to her figure and libertine lifestyle.
One of her most well-known films was "And God Created Woman," in 1956, where she starred as an 18-year-old caught up in a love triangle, which was directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim.
Vadim once promised that Bardot would become "the unattainable fantasy of all married men." A few years later, in 1963, she played a sullen, frustrated wife of a screenwriter in Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt," which featured scenes that became part of cinema folklore.
However, by 1973 Bardot announced she had become "sick of being beautiful every day," as she turned her back on acting to look after abandoned animals.
In the early 1980s, Bardot travelled to Canada and experienced a "life-changing" visit when she witnessed its annual seal cub culls.
The Brigitte Bardot Foundation was set up in 1986 and was dedicated to animal protection. Bardot crusaded for baby seals and elephants, called for the abolition of ritual animal sacrifice and the closure of horse abattoirs.
In a 2011 letter to conservation group WWF, she retold her viewing of the cull of seal cubs, saying: "I will never forget these pictures, the screams of pain, they still torture me but they have given me the strength to sacrifice my whole life to defend the animal's one."
While Bardot's advocacy stepped, criticism of her comments and political statements saw her face a backlash.
She was repeatedly fined by French courts between 1997 and 2008 for remarks judged to constitute incitement to racial or religious hatred, including statements directed at France’s Muslim community.
According to court rulings she was convicted at least five times during that period with her most severe penalty coming in 2008, when a Paris court fined her €15,000 over a letter criticizing Muslim ritual slaughter.
Bardot married Bernard d’Ormale, a former adviser to the far-right National Front in 1992 and later went on to publicly endorse the party's successive leaders, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen.