Bardot, Brigitte (b. 1934)

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BARDOT, BRIGITTE (b. 1934)

French actress and activist.

The choice of Brigitte Bardot in 1970 as the first real-life model for the bust of the French national emblem Marianne was perhaps more significant than the sculptor Alain Gourdon had intended. Following references to a legendary Marianne in the writings of the French revolutionaries, the image of Marianne, meant to embody the republic's ideal of liberty, entered the realm of visual interpretation in the nineteenth century. Two centuries of idealized iconography later, the conjunction of Marianne and Bardot came as an ingenious—if unintentional—comment on the real woman's own revolutionary role in post–World War II French culture. Only in Bardot's case, the revolution in question was sexual.

Bardot first made her mark at the age of twenty-two in Et Dieu créa la femme (1956; And God created woman), directed by her husband at the time, Roger Vadim. Arbiters of morality in the French provinces were shocked by the way in which Vadim's film showcased a brand of female sexuality never before seen in their national cinema. Audiences were accustomed to well-groomed, womanly stars such as Danielle Darrieux, Micheline Presle, and Edwige Feuillère. As for Bardot, it was difficult to tell she had been raised in Paris's posh sixteenth arrondissement. Her wild hair, bare feet, little-girl voice, and disregard for all fashion—including girdles—were a titillating foil for her athletic voluptuousness. Here and in other movies that featured her in orphan and schoolgirl roles, Bardot eroticized the quality of girlishness. Quickly christened "BB" (bébé, or baby) in the French media, Bardot obliged by displaying innocent knowingness offscreen as well, claiming in interviews that she had not performed in Et Dieu, but simply "was." The unapologetic pleasure in her own body that she exhibited on-screen elicited letters from indignant parents to newspaper editors, politicians, and priests. She was even blamed for episodes of juvenile delinquency. Bardot found an unlikely defender in the person of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who was intrigued by the actress's uncomplicated relationship to her sexuality: amoral rather than immoral. More likely, it was less BB's way of being in the world on- and offscreen than her not-your-mother's-Dior "new look" that appealed to young women at the time.

Bardot would go on to make two more notable films, Le mépris (1963; Contempt, directed by Jean-Luc Godard) and Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965). Also worth noting are her sultry recordings with the brilliant singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg ("Harley-Davidson," "Je t'aime … moi non plus," "Bonnie and Clyde"), and her appearance at the Elysée Palace—invited by Charles de Gaulle—wearing pants.

If Brigitte Bardot is one of the few French actresses of the 1950s and 1960s familiar to the American public, it is less for her acting career, which ended in 1973, than for her status as a sex symbol, which persisted even as she took up the two brands of activism for which she is best known in the early twenty-first century. Animal rights have been her cause célèbre;her campaign to protect baby seals began in 1977, the year before her reign as Marianne ended. She created the Fondation Brigitte Bardot in Saint Tropez in 1986. "Je t'aime … moi non plus," recorded with Gainsbourg in 1967, was only released in 1986 on the condition that all proceeds go to her animal rights foundation. More recently and most troublingly, her 1992 marriage to the National Front politician Bernard D'Oremale coincided with a chain of racist statements and stances. She has faced four convictions from French courts for "inciting racial hatred." In June 2004 she was fined for the first time, for her comparison of Muslims in France to barbaric invaders in her best-selling book Un cri dans le silence (A cry in the silence) . It is difficult to believe this is the same BB whose frenetic solo dance in the company of Afro-Cuban musicians revealed generous glimpses of her inner thighs to an emasculated husband, would-be lovers, and the moviegoer in the culminating scene of Et Dieu créa la femme.

See alsoCinema; France.