Brigitte Bardot, who has died at the age of 91, managed the neat trick of becoming the most famous French export since champagne and baguettes while spending much of her life insisting she wanted nothing to do with the fuss. Born in 1934 to a pious industrialist father and a mother who treated child-rearing as an extension of ballet discipline, young Brigitte was packed off to dance classes where she excelled at pointing her toes, but showed early signs of preferring to point them in whatever direction she fancied.
By fifteen she was on the cover of Elle, looking like the sort of girl who could make a convent school uniform seem subversive. Roger Vadim, six years older and already practising the art of looking wolfish, spotted the photographs, tracked her down, and promptly turned a teenage infatuation into a marriage, a career, and – with And God Created Woman in 1956 – an international incident. America, still recovering from the shock of Elvis’s pelvis, greeted Bardot’s barefoot mambo and unapologetic appetite for life with a mixture of rapture and moral panic. Cinemas banned the film; critics banned the word 'decency' from their vocabularies; Simone de Beauvoir wrote an essay declaring her the first truly liberated woman. Bardot herself, trapped inside the phenomenon, complained that she had mostly been required to undress rather than act. A fair point, though one suspects the complaint was delivered while wearing something that left very little to the imagination.
Marriages came and went with the reliability of French railway strikes: Vadim (the svengali), Jacques Charrier (the resented pregnancy), Gunter Sachs (the playboy who arrived by helicopter), and finally Bernard d’Ormale, a political adviser who provided the one apparently stable harbour in a stormy sea of lovers, lawsuits and suicide attempts. Motherhood, when it arrived, was greeted with the enthusiasm usually reserved for tax audits; her son Nicolas later sued her after she remarked in print that she would rather have given birth to a puppy. One can only admire the consistency of her candour.
By 1973, after nearly fifty films and enough pout to power a small nation, she quit the screen, auctioned her jewels, and announced she was giving her remaining beauty to animals instead of men. The Brigitte Bardot Foundation became her true vocation: seals were saved, horses defended, stray dogs sterilised, and anyone who disagreed was informed, in forthright terms, that they were barbarians. Alas, the same forthrightness extended to immigrants, the gay community, and more or less anyone who failed her increasingly stringent purity tests, earning her a string of court appearances and fines that left even French prosecutors wearily declaring they’d had enough.
In the end, the girl who once embodied absolute freedom chose to spend her later years as a recluse, surrounded by pets and protected by a husband whose politics made her early scandals look positively wholesome. It was, in its way, a perfectly Gallic trajectory: outrageous, contradictory, impossible to ignore, and utterly indifferent to what anyone thought.