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Bon Anniversaire, Brigitte – Sorry We’re Late

The French screen goddess, Brigitte Bardot, turned 75 last Monday. For her birthday she asked her “splendid twin” Sophia Loren, who also turned 75 this month, to stop wearing fur. Thirty-six years ago Bardot turned her back on movie sets and became an animal rights activist. She is celebrated in a photo exhibit outside Paris that opened on September 29.

Back in post-war 1950s, Bardot epitomised for most young British men the ideal modern woman.  To us, at the time, it was not just that she was a fabulously sexy French pin-up, nor was the alacrity with which she got her clothes off, though important, the whole story.  Equally significant was that her lifestyle and that of the characters she played in her films seemed to us to herald the coming of a new era of sexual liberation.  

 “She does what she pleases and that is what upsets,” wrote feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in a 1959 essay about Bardot.  It may have upset  our parents, but it did not upset us.      

Tired of celebrity and constant press and media attention – the paparazzi used to swarm around her as they did later around Princess Diana - Bardot retired in 1973 and shut herself up in her Mediterranean villa to live the life of a virtual hermit, though she did emerge from her St Tropez seclusion every now and then to publicise her campaign for animal rights.  She posed famously with baby seals on icebergs, sold off many of her possessions to fund her animal rights foundation, and was written off by most of the press as a crank.

Apart from these occasional campaign appearances, she has continued to maintain a relatively low profile, living holed up in the French Riviera with her animals.  In the mid 1990s she wrote to her fellow star Sophia Loren accusing her of “wearing a cemetery” on her back after the Italian actress modelled fur.  Loren never answered.

Bardot blotted her copybook when she married her fourth husband, a former aide of far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, and was prosecuted several times for inciting racial hatred by attacking what she called the “Islamisation” of France.     

Unlike many screen stars, she has never attempted to hide her age and has never resorted to cosmetic surgery, but out of respect and admiration for her, Frogsiders will today publish only pictures of how she used to be. 

A photo exhibition, Brigitte Bardot, Les Années ‘insouciance’ featuring some 2,000 photos, films and features opened yesterday at the l’Espace Landowski in Paris and runs until January 31.

Frogsiders can’t let this week pass without wishing Brigitte Bardot a happy 75th birthday – and we apologise for being a couple of days late with our greeting.

Bardot - so French

An early pin-up shot

Ah Brigitte! Que tu étais belle!

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