Brigitte Bardot, the French icon who glamorously embodied the postwar pop zeitgeist, has died. Her animal rights foundation announced the news in a statement sent to Agence France-Presse. No cause or date of death were given. Bardot was 91 years old.
Bardot was born into a wealthy Parisian family in 1934 and trained as a ballerina before landing the modeling jobs that launched her whirlwind career. She posed for the cover of Elle at 15 and made her acting debut two years later, in the comedy Le Trou Normand. Throughout the ’50s, her appearance in risqué French films, some directed by then-husband Roger Vadim, endeared her to future giants of the nouvelle vague. Among them were Jean-Luc Godard, who cast her in his 1963 film Contempt, and new-wave godfather Louis Malle, whose Viva Maria! starred Bardot alongside Jeanne Moreau.
Bardot started releasing music in the ’60s, collaborating with Bob Zagury, Sacha Distel, and, most sensationally, Serge Gainsbourg. Late in the decade, amid a scandalous affair conducted during her third marriage, Bardot and Gainsbourg released the classic duets “Comic Strip” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” A 1968 album, Bonnie and Clyde, compiled her recordings of various Gainsbourg numbers.
In 1973, Bardot announced her retirement from the entertainment industry, after which she became a prominent animal rights activist. In 1986, she founded the Fondation Brigitte Bardot to support global animal welfare. By the turn of the century, she had received the first of several fines for Islamophobic remarks, which often used discussion of halal meat practice to springboard into aggressively nationalist rhetoric about perceived “savages,” immigration, and racial purity. By 2021, she had been fined six times for inciting racial hatred.
Bardot is survived by her husband, Bernard d’Ormale, a former aide to the French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose successor, Marine Le Pen, Bardot endorsed in recent elections.