The French screen star and animal-rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died at her home in southern France, per reports. She was 91 years old.
As revered for her sensual performances in films by Roger Vadim and Jean-Luc Godard as for her distinctive brand of undone chic, Bardot remained a pop-cultural icon long after she retired from acting in 1973, at the age of 39. In 2016, on the occasion of the release of Brigitte Bardot: My Life in Fashion, a visual memoir from Flammarion, Leslie Camhi spoke to the aging star, then 82, about her childhood, her lovers, and her singular style.
She kneels at her dressing table with her back to us, her torso wrapped in a towel, her head turned slightly in profile, tiger cub’s nose and Cupid’s-bow pout peeking out from beneath a luxuriant blonde mane. With one manicured hand, she holds up a little mirror into which she gazes, transfixed by her own image, like Venus in an old-master painting—yet bathed in the light of modern celebrity.
Vogue ran William Klein’s photograph of 24-year-old Brigitte Bardot on a full page in March 1958, alongside a brief article mentioning the French star’s “maximum of animal magnetism” and her four films playing simultaneously in “intellectual movie-art theaters” in New York. It is not a fashion photograph—its subject is shown après bain or just before the towel drops, when we might, at least in imagination, possess her. The Summer of Love is still almost a decade away. Yet despite her babyish features and seemingly tender flesh, Bardot represents, all on her own, a one-woman sexual revolution.
“I never was fashionable, so I never went out of fashion,” she says, giving a rare interview from La Madrague, the villa in St.-Tropez, its high walls covered in bougainvillea, that has been her refuge for more than half a century. Though she is 82, in somewhat fragile health, and notoriously reclusive, her deep, rich voice—colored, perhaps, by years of smoking—still conveys an astonishing vitality. Bardot’s charm, like that of a child, is her intense allegiance to the present, her absolute lack of vanity, and her directness. “I mean, I never followed fashion; I did it my own way. I was ahead of my time,” she says simply. “And when you are right too early, you are always wrong.”
Nothing in her very proper bourgeois childhood could have predicted the iconoclast to come. Born in 1934, Bardot grew up the elder of two daughters in a conservative Parisian family. “My parents were elegant and serious people who preferred the company of sophisticated society,” she recalls. “They were not the least bit bohemian.”
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