Her fame was too great for her to carry, and her freedom too real to last as the illusion the world wanted to watch
Brigitte Bardot passed away at the age of 91, quietly in her home near Saint-Tropez – the town she herself turned into a myth through sheer association. With her does not disappear just one actress, but an entire vision of French cinema: sun on 35mm film, Gitanes cigarette smoke in the frame, the feeling that Europe, at least on screen, could be free, bold, disheveled and tender all at once.
For many, she will forever remain tied to one single shot: a young woman dancing barefoot mambo in Roger Vadim’s 1956 film And God Created Woman – the scene that made the world suddenly realize something irreversible had changed in postwar morality. That film turned her into a global icon, but also into a label that followed her for life – “sex symbol”. She herself recoiled from that expression, feeling more like someone trying to survive her own fame than like a poster on someone’s wall.
Above all, she was a dancer. As a little girl she dreamed of ballet, trained with discipline in a strict Parisian home where much was expected and little forgiven. Fashion photography brought her to the cover of Elle at fifteen, then to the doors of film studios, and eventually to Vadim – her first husband and the architect of the Bardot myth. Behind the scenes, however, there was no easy fairy tale. Depression, exhaustion, suicide attempts followed her precisely at the peak of her fame, already around the filming of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Vérité, where she delivered perhaps her most complex acting performance.
La Vérité (The Truth), a black-and-white film about a young woman accused of murdering her lover, showed Bardot to those willing to see her beyond the cliché. In that story of love and condemnation, of a male society coldly judging the woman whose passion it had celebrated just yesterday, Bardot carried the weight of an entire generation. She wasn’t just a “pretty face”, but young France searching for itself between the desire for freedom and the reprimand that such freedom inevitably brings.
Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt) from 1963 – personally my favorite of her films – did something else: it placed Brigitte Bardot at the center of one of the most important works of European modernism. In a film where a screenwriter’s marriage falls apart amid the filming of an Odyssey adaptation, her Camille is neither seductress nor victim, but an incomprehensible, changeable, restless woman who no longer knows where she belongs – in her husband’s bed, in the producers’ fantasies, or in her own skin… That restlessness, captured in wide CinemaScope shots above the sea, became a symbol of the collapse of an old cinematic as well as social order.
During those years Bardot made a whole series of films that marked French and European cinema: from the comedy-adventure Viva Maria! by Louis Malle, where side by side with Jeanne Moreau she turns a cabaret show into an improvised revolution, to romantic and musical films in which she both acted and sang. She became the face of Marianne, the allegory of the French Republic, immortalized on busts in public institutions. By then the state itself had already acknowledged that it saw something of its own myth in her.
At the same time, she became a project for many intellectuals. Simone de Beauvoir wrote an essay calling her “the locomotive of women’s history”, the first truly liberated woman of postwar France. In just twenty years in front of the camera, Bardot made 47 films and recorded over 60 songs, creating the image of a woman who, despite being desired and wanted by everyone, persistently escaped definition.
But the price of that myth was, predictably, high. Paparazzi literally hunted her, her house was under siege, every breakup turned into a public spectacle. She later said she felt like a hunted animal. That comparison proved prophetic. At the age of 39, long before it was common for stars to do so, she decided to end her film career. She said she had given her youth and beauty to men and to film, and the rest of her life she would give to animals. In 1986 she founded the foundation that bears her name. She sold jewelry and parts of her property to finance shelters, campaigns against seal hunting, against fur, against animal testing. From then until her final days, she remained a proud and militant animal rights advocate. There is no doubt that she found great solace there.
Her biography, like the biography of the 20th century itself, had many different chapters. In her later years she openly aligned herself with the French right, supported Marine Le Pen, but also her much harder-line father Jean-Marie (who died earlier this year). She wrote against immigration and Islam in France, and was convicted multiple times for inciting racial hatred. For part of the audience that grew up with her films, this was very hard to accept… It was equally hard to separate her fight against cruelty to animals – which even earned her the Legion of Honour (which she symbolically refused) – from the harsh rhetoric that offended entire communities. That contradiction remains part of her story, a reminder that icons are never one-dimensional, and that the era we remember with nostalgia was never made only of beauty and freedom.
In her private life, behind the glamour and platinum hair, she led a life of constant searching for love. Four marriages, numerous relationships, a complicated relationship with her son Nicolas about whom she wrote in her memoirs with discomfort and guilt, a constant battle with depression… All of this made the human being behind the place where the world saw only an icon. In interviews she could be brutally honest, both toward herself and others, often to the point of cruelty.
In her final years she lived almost like a hermit in La Madrague, her house above the sea, surrounded by dogs, cats, donkeys and goats. She didn’t use a mobile phone or computer. In a rare television interview in 2025 she appeared fragile, but still stubborn. She stated: “Feminism is not for me. I love men,” repeating her old skepticism toward organized feminism, while confirming that she had lived her own life by rules that were neither male nor female – simply hers.
For our region, for the generations that grew up in Yugoslavia, Bardot was one of the first windows into a different Europe. In cinemas and on television we watched her run along the beaches of Saint-Tropez, stay silent on the terrace above the endless Mediterranean in Le Mépris, start a revolution with laughter and fireworks in Viva Maria!. Her hairstyle, striped shirts, that whole style became a universal sign of a freer youth. But what we are really saying goodbye to today is not the fashion, but the feeling that film once carried the promise of a life that wasn’t programmed, that could still happen spontaneously, like an improvised dance in frame.
The death of Brigitte Bardot is not the end of French cinema, but it is the end of one of its legends. Perhaps more than anyone else, she embodied the contradiction of the 20th century – a woman the world turned into a fantasy, who then spent the rest of her life defending those without a voice. She was the actress who ran away from the cameras, but never from controversy; an icon of freedom who in old age spoke words many cannot reconcile with. And perhaps it is exactly in that combination of light and shadow that her departure touches us so deeply, because it reminds us that even the era we mourn was never perfect – it just existed.
Maybe that is why the most beautiful farewell to Brigitte Bardot can be found in the final images of Le Mépris – the sea, the house on the cliff, the figures slowly moving away while the camera stays behind. Today the camera remains, and she has gone. What remains are the films, the photographs, the old posters, the joyful music of the sixties – and the memory of a woman who, whether she wanted it or not, marked our idea of what freedom looks like. In the meantime many illusions about her and about the France she personified with her image have vanished, but outside the reality we escape from into the world of film, everything we believed in there remains forever.
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