Brigitte Bardot, one of the world's biggest stars of cinema, has died.
She was 91 and had been in hospital in the southern French city of Toulon since November.
In a statement the Brigitte Bardot Foundation announced her death with "immense sadness", describing her as 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."
Known for her enormous impact on the silver screen in the 1950s, "BB" as she was widely called in France, was an essential ingredient in French culture and soon became an icon after her first role in Le Trou Normand (1952)
From bourgeois Parisian beginnings, she set her heart of becoming a singer and dancer and was picked out as a model at the age of 15.
Two more films followed in 1952 and she also got married at the same time to the film director Roger Vadim. A year later Bardot took Hollywood and the United States by storm, and her status as a teenage "sex-kitten" was firmly established.
When Bardot starred in the 1956 movie 'And God Created Woman', directed by her then-husband, Roger Vadim, it triggered a scandal with scenes of the long-legged beauty dancing on tables naked.
The film, which portrayed Bardot as a bored newlywed who beds her brother-in-law, had a decisive influence on New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, and came to embody the hedonism and sexual freedom of the 1960s.
“It’s an embarrassment to have acted so badly,” Bardot said of her early films. “I suffered a lot in the beginning. I was really treated like someone less than nothing.”
She went on to feature in a total of 28 films over two decades and become a symbole of women's sexual liberation.
Bardot’s second career as an animal rights activist was equally sensational. She traveled to the Arctic to blow the whistle on the slaughter of baby seals; she condemned the use of animals in laboratory experiments; and she opposed sending monkeys into space.
“Man is an insatiable predator,” Bardot told The Associated Press on her 73rd birthday, in 2007. “I don’t care about my past glory. That means nothing in the face of an animal that suffers, since it has no power, no words to defend itself.”
Her activism earned her compatriots’ respect and, in 1985, she was awarded the Legion of Honour, France's top accolade.
Later, however, she fell from public grace as her animal protection diatribes took on a decidedly extremist tone and her far-right political views sounded racist as she frequently decried the influx of immigrants into France, especially Muslims.
She was convicted five times in French courts of inciting racial hatred. Notably, she criticised the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep during annual religious holidays like Eid al-Adha.
Bardot’s 1992 marriage to fourth husband Bernard d’Ormale, a onetime adviser to former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, contributed to her political shift. She described the outspoken nationalist as a “lovely, intelligent man.”
In 2012, she caused controversy again when she wrote a letter in support of Marine Le Pen, the current leader of the party — now renamed National Rally — in her failed bid for the French presidency.
In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Bardot said in an interview that most actors protesting sexual harassment in the film industry were “hypocritical” and “ridiculous” because many played “the teases” with producers to land parts.
She said she had never had been a victim of sexual harassment and found it “charming to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass.”
French President Emmanuel Macron took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to share his condolences. "We are mourning a legend,'' he wrote on the social media platform on Sunday morning.
"Her films, her voice, her dazzling fame, her initials, her sorrows, her generous passion for animals, her face that became Marianne—Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom. A French existence, a universal radiance. She touched us. We mourn a legend of the century."
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