Despite this phrase ‘I think better without a husband’ and her boundless passion for animals, it cannot be said that Brigitte Bardot lacked love for men. They range from Roger Vadim to Jean-Louis Trintignant, from Gilbert Bécaud to Raf Vallone, from Sacha Distel to Jacques Charrier (with whom she had her son Nicolas-Jacques), from Günter Sachs to Serge Gainsbourg up to the last Bernard d’Ormale, with whom she had been married since 1992.
And then there are the secret loves like the one for Jean Paul Belmondo and the short, but intense ones lived barefoot, like the one for Gigi Rizzi, a few months of love between Capri and Saint Tropez.
However, her first love was for the director and screenwriter Roger Vadim. She is little more than a teenager, fifteen years old, he is already an adult. He invents her as a modern myth with ‘Et Dieu… créa la femme’. The two eventually get married (it is the first of his four marriages) but it does not last long also due to the parallel arrival of Jean-Louis Trintignant. With the actor, who was the co-star of Roger Vadim’s film, an intense yet fragile story is born.
In 1959 Bardot married the actor Jacques Charrier, a union marked by a failed attempt at normality. However, from this love comes the actress’s only son, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier. But Bardot experiences motherhood and marriage with too much constraint and their relationship quickly frays.
In 1966, a thousand roses rained on BB’s villa in Saint-Tropez.
They were launched by Gunter Sachs, billionaire and dandy. And it is still a marriage, which lasted only three years, between luxury and the jet set increasingly less loved by Brigitte.
With Serge Gainsbourg in the autumn of 1967 it was an artistic meeting and a close love. Together they record ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ which becomes a manifesto of sensuality and transgression. Gainsbourg then dedicated ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ to her, initially recorded with her but never released to avoid a scandal. The song will only see the light of day years later in the version with Jane Birkin.
Her last love is Bernard d’Ormale, a businessman and leading figure of the French right: with him the actress completes her abandonment from the scene and ends up in La Madrague, dedicating her life to the defense of animals.
Then there is the all-Italian story between Bardot and the very Mediterranean playboy Gigi Rizzi, one of the most emblematic of the Italian Dolce Vita. Rizzi is one of the protagonists of that world together with figures such as Porfirio Rubirosa and Ali Khan.
Finally, in her autobiography ‘Initiales BB’, the actress talks explicitly about Jean-Paul Belmondo and describes him as one of the most important, but unfulfilled loves of her life.
In short, there was no consummated relationship, certainly not due to lack of desire, but because they met at the wrong times.
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