The star of Brigitte Bardot passed away at the age of 91. She was the first planetary star and the symbol of limitless, almost brazen beauty, then an indomitable rebel in defense of the animal cause. An icon, that of BB, who in de Gaulle’s France embodied the very symbol of the country, the Marianne, a symbol to which he gave his face.
She was “the French Marilyn Monroe” her fans and biographers remember today. Emmanuel Macron, to whom the actress had not spared violent criticism, today paid an emotional tribute, calling her “a legend of the century” who “embodied a life of freedom”.
She had been hospitalized several times in recent months, most recently in November. And each time alarming rumors spread about his health. This morning, at dawn, she passed away alongside her husband Bernard d’Ormale, who has always remained close to her in recent times. He was at Madrague, his residence that became famous in Saint-Tropez. To BFM, the head of external relations of her foundation, Bruno Jacquelin, confided that 5 minutes before 6, the actress whispered to her husband ‘piou piou’, the words of love and understanding between the two. Then, his last breath came. Bernard d’Ormale, who she met at Jean-Marie Le Pen’s house when she definitively moved towards the far right in the 1990s, was BB’s last husband. Before him, the director who launched it, Roger Vadim, then Jacques Charrier and Gunter Sachs.
But his loves and relationships were countless, especially with protagonists of the scene. First of all Raf Vallone, one of the most famous actors in Italy, then Gilbert Bécaud, Sacha Distel, Serge Gansbourg, Warren Beatty, Nino Ferrer and many others. Always lively loves and stories, in some cases secret, overlapping one another. Among the many taboos she broke, also that of motherhood: she had only one child, in 1960, Nicolas, just when she was at the height of her planetary glory and permanently surrounded by notebooks, cameras and television cameras. She proclaimed herself to have no maternal instinct and left little Nicolas to be raised by Jacques Charrier, his father.
She was “madly free and…so French…” the Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, said of her today. The myth of BB exploded in all its power with the release of Vadim’s film “And God…created woman”, from 1956, which arrived in Italy only two years later with the title “Too Many Like It”. There Brigitte was only 22 years old, but her vitality and beauty overwhelmed everything: the scene of BB who, on a table in Saint-Tropez, unleashes an irresistible barefoot mambo, was forever imprinted in the imagination of the French.
“Brigitte Bardot made Saint-Tropez shine in the world”, recalled today the mayor of the pearl of the Côte d’Azur. Director Claude Lelouch, interviewed today, recalled that President Charles de Gaulle, precisely in the years of the explosion of the BB myth, told him: “France is me and Brigitte Bardot”. She, Lelouche added, “was more than an actress, she was France.
It was a revolution, because in a world of fakes, she didn’t pretend.” The film was not well received in France, the slit in BB’s long skirt as she danced caused a scandal, but the myth was born. The girls of the late fifties dreamed of looking like her. Simone de Beauvoir is among her admirers: “Barefoot, she doesn’t care about elegant clothes, jewels, perfumes and make-up. She does what she likes and this is disturbing.”
In those years, the very young BB became the object of desire of all the “paparazzi” in the world, even her birth in 1960 took place at home to hide her from the curiosity of the crazed media, with dozens of photographers kept away from her windows.
Brigitte’s beauty and sensuality spanned the Sixties, Serge Gainsbourg wrote for her (who had asked her for “the most beautiful song he could imagine”) “Je t’aime…moi non plus”, then the same author said: “She is a daughter of her time, who freed herself from all the feelings of guilt, from all the taboos that society imposed on her”. All characteristics that shine in his interpretation of “Contempt” by Jean-Luc Godard. It was 1963 and BB on the screen left right-thinking people speechless when – under the Capri sun, naked – she addressed Michel Piccoli like this: “how do you find my bottom, cute? And do you like breasts?”. This will be followed by “Viva Maria”, directed by Louis Malle and a cult film for the French, then “Erasmus the Freckled”, with James Stewart, to establish his fame even overseas.
The glory and publicity achieved, together with his indomitable character, meant that BB – at the height of his success, in 1973 – said enough to cinema at less than forty years old. His second life will be dedicated to animals. He settled in Saint-Tropez, which before the passage of BB like a storm was a quiet fishing village, in the residence of La Madrague. Not far away, in the woods, he hosts and takes care of all his animals, in La Garrigue: “My office is there, I rest in Madrague”, he said.
In 1986 she created the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, dedicated to the defense of animals, with epochal and almost always successful battles against the slaughter of seal pups, the abolition of ritual slaughter, the closure of horse slaughterhouses, the defense of elephants in Africa. At the same time, the turn towards the far right, the violently anti-immigration theses, against Muslims, gays, feminists, which earned her many convictions in court. And the strong relationship, which lasted years, with the Le Pen family, first with Jean-Marie, then with her daughter Marine.
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