Brigitte Anne Marie Bardot or BBa woman, an actress, an artist who made herself known with her initials, so iconic, disruptive and divisive that she only needed two letters. “I was very happy, very rich, very beautiful, but also very famous and very unhappy” in this sentence you can encapsulate the meaning of a life and career lived from fifteen to forty years in a fast, intense, total way for the public and art. To then decide on the eve of that important birthday, especially for a woman in the Seventies, to completely withdraw from the scene but, albeit in her own way, not to disappear given that only a short time ago she was criticizing President Macron from her Twitter account. Since 1973 she has closed herself in her villa on the hills of Cannes where her battles have been concentrated for animal rights, with the creation of her Foundation by auctioning her jewelsand against French Islam and religious ritual practices of halal slaughter. With a fascination for the political programs of the French right and a friendship with the Le Pen family, Bardot has on several occasions attacked the French president and supported the battles of the gilet jaune.
Forty-five films, seventy songsBrigitte Bardot still remains one of the best-known French actresses in the world perhaps by virtue of her step back, of her having closed herself off from the world, of having stopped acting which transformed her forever into the icon of beauty and sensuality of her twenties and thirties. He has worked with directors of the highest caliber such as Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard helping to overturn certain female icons since the first film, God created womanin which he proposes the image of a sexually emancipated “natural” young woman whom the Cahiers du cinema support and espouse.
Born in Paris on 28 September 1954, daughter of a rich industrialist, with a complicated relationship with her strict mother who poured out her ambitions as a failed dancer onto her daughter, at a very young age she dedicated herself entirely to dance and at fifteen she was enrolled at the Paris Conservatory when she was offered a contract as a model and often ended up on the cover of Elle, whose director was a friend of her mother. “A photograph can be a moment of life captured for eternity that will never stop looking back” a more mature Brigitte would later say, meanwhile that shot became her business card for the cinema. Director Marc Allegret has his assistant Roger Vadim contact her and it was love at first sight. The two married in 1952 two months after Brigitte became eighteen, much to the opposition of her family.
Although her camera-loving father shot many amateur films starring his daughter, Brigitte’s first experiences on a real set were not simple and her first films were of little importance: insipid love stories for French cinema, small parts in international productions, but her presence at the festival on the Croisette eclipsed established stars such as Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, even thanks to her bikini and sometimes even topless outfits. The first worldwide success came with her husband Roger Vadim’s film in 1956 And God created womanin which she is the protagonist married to the brother of the man she desires. In times when in the United States the model of femininity was still the girl next door Doris Day and films were still judged by the Hays code of morality, in France BB was not afraid to undress on the big screen contributing to her popularity in cassette films such as The girl of sin (1958) alongside Jean Gabin.
A few years after the film Contempt by Jean Luc Godard from the novel by Alberto Moravia arrived in Italy cut and distorted by the producer Carlo Ponti who forced the French director to disown it. A tribute to cinema and Italy, the film tells the story of a writer (Michel Piccoli) and his young and attractive wife Camille (Bardot) between Malaparte’s villa in Capri and the Cinecittà studios, where the author is summoned by a producer to rewrite a film deemed too uncommercial, whose director is Fritz Lang in the role of himself. Among the changes is a famous nude sequence at the beginning of the film that the American producers had requested and which Ponti then cut in the Italian version found many years later.
In the sixties he worked with important directors such as Henri – Georges Clouzot (The truth1960), Louis Malle (Private life1962). With Godard as well as Contempt she shot a funny western in Mexico alongside Jeanne Moreau in which she was a gunslinger, Long live Mary! (1965). In the meantime, her love life also had some repercussions since Vadim separated in 1956, followed by many relationships lasting a few months: Jean – Louis Trintignantthe secret one with the singer Gilbert Becaud married, to the actor Raf Vallonewith the musician Sacha Distel. In 1959 she married the actor Jacques Charrie and the following year his only child was born Nicolas-Jacques Charrier. The relationship with motherhood is complex, BB is tormented by paparazzi, besieged, the child is entrusted to a nanny and her fragility leads her to attempt to take her own life several times. On the set of The truth by Malle – a film partly inspired by her life and her torments with a sequence taken directly from her experience, that of a woman who rails against her on the street – begins a new love story, with the actor Sami Freyfor which she separated from her husband, a tormented relationship with Charrier and with her son Nicolas who went so far as to denounce her in court years later following the release of her autobiography They call me BB
In the sixties the cinematographic career joins the musical one, the songs with Serge Gainsbourg arrive: Bonnie and Clyde, Comic Strip e I love you…me neithera new artistic collaboration, a new fleeting love, which sends a new husband, the very rich German playboy, into a rage Gunter Sachs which goes as far as banning the song from being aired. The relationship lasted from ’66 to ’69. The fourth and last marriage came only in 1992 with a political exponent of the National Front, Bernard d’Ormale.
After rejecting a film by James Bond, In the service of his majesty he still makes some films comand The Rum Road with Lino Ventura, Le gunners with Claudia Cardinale and A woman like me still with ex-husband Roger Vadim. In 1974, just before her fortieth birthday, Brigitte Bardot announced her retirement from the stageafter having shot more than fifty films and released six albums. In the same year she posed topless in the September issue of the Italian edition of Playboy.
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“BB is dead now. It was just an image. Now I’m a different person” he said on the eve of his 80th birthday. The feeling is that he lived the last part of his life as he wanted in his hermitage of Saint-Tropezthe Madrague estate that became Noah’s ark.
