14 Facts About Brigitte Bardot: The French Femme Fatale

Brigitte grew up in a wealthy, strict bourgeois family in Paris. Her parents demanded perfect manners and obedience, and she trained seriously as a ballet dancer from a young age. Her childhood was anything but free.

At 18, Bardot married director Roger Vadim, partly to escape her strict parents. Vadim turned her into a sex symbol and directed her in the controversial And God Created Woman (1956), which made her world-famous. The marriage lasted about five years.

During the filming of And God Created Woman, Bardot began a passionate affair with co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant. The problem? She was married to Vadim and he was married to actress Stéphane Audran. The affair became a national scandal, but Bardot didn't care.

Bardot became a mother in 1960 to her only son, Nicolas. But motherhood didn't suit her: she suffered badly during pregnancy and later wrote painfully frank words about it in her memoirs, which led to a court case with her son and his father. Their relationship remained complicated for much of her life.

At the height of her fame, Bardot was so famous that fans and photographers constantly tried to get into her home. She lived in Saint-Tropez, at her villa La Madrague, but regularly had to flee the hysteria.

The pressure of fame became too much. On her 26th birthday in 1960, shortly after the birth of her son, she attempted to take her own life. She survived, but it showed how dark her life behind the glamour could be.

Bardot had a short but intense affair with Serge Gainsbourg, the provocative French musician. He wrote Je t'aime... moi non plus for her and they recorded it together, but she asked him not to release it because of the scandal it would cause with her then-husband. He later re-recorded it with Jane Birkin, and it became a worldwide hit.

In 1973, at just 39, Bardot suddenly announced her retirement from film. She was done with being a sex symbol, disappeared from the big screen and decided to devote her life to animal rights.

After leaving film, Bardot became France's most famous animal rights activist. She campaigned fiercely against fur, hunting, seal clubbing and animal cruelty, founding the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in 1986 and even selling her jewelry to fund it. She kept fighting for animals into old age.

Bardot's activism regularly derailed into harsh statements. She was convicted several times in France for inciting racial hatred, mainly over remarks about Muslims and immigration, with at least five convictions in total.

Bardot never hesitated to publicly criticize celebrities, friends included, who wore fur, and she was known for sending sharp open letters to anyone she felt harmed animals.

Bardot received many offers from Hollywood but turned most of them down. She didn't like the Hollywood machine and preferred to stay in France, which is why, unlike Marilyn Monroe, she never made a big American film.

In 1992 Bardot married Bernard d'Ormale, a businessman and former adviser to far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. His political views matched her own controversial statements and caused even more uproar around her public image.

In her later years Bardot avoided public appearances and most interviews, living a secluded life in Saint-Tropez surrounded by her animals. She died in December 2025 at the age of 91, and France paid tribute to one of its greatest icons.