Briggite Bardot, the Parisian born in 1934 today turns 85, and during this 2019 she will celebrate 46 away from the fast-paced world of spectacle. “I gave my youth and beauty to people,” he said when he made the decision to dedicate his life to animal care awareness. “Now I will give my wisdom and experience—in the best possible way—to animals.” Raised in a middle-class Catholic family in Paris, her childhood was defined by ballet, which gave her that languid figure, away from the curves of her contemporary Marilyn Monroe. She was discovered at the age of fifteen by director Roger Vadim when she appeared on the cover of Elle magazine, and it was he who recommended that she take acting classes. Bardot and Vadim were married for five years, between 1952 and 1957, but their big-screen debut came from Jean Boyer with Le trou normand in 1952, with a minor role. It was her leading role in Y Dios created the woman (“Et Dieu— créa la femme”) of 1956, a film warmly received in her native France but an absolute success in the United States, which would throw her to stardom and establish her as the quintessential sex symbol of the next Decade.
His rise was meteoric: for the next fifteen years he shot more than twenty films, including classics such as Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965) and The Contempt (Le mépris, 1963) with director Jean-Luc Godard, and recorded several albums. But Bardot never felt comfortable with fame and decided to retire in 1973. In a 2014 interview she said she was a “victim of her image” and in her autobiography (“Initials B.B,” published in 1995) she explains that the madness around her felt “unreal”:”I was never prepared for the life of a star. I’m much happier with my routine today than when I was chased by a hundred photographers.” This routine includes, from the establishment of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Care and Protection of Animals, a furious animal rights activism since being held in her home in Saint Tropez, the French town that has become a sanctuary for Bardot, and who loves him as much as he hates for the invasion of “tourists and social events,” which avoids and terrorizes her.
To make his foundation a reality Bardot not only gave up his career at 39 but also sold all his possessions except two houses: La Madrague and La Garrigue, where he lives with dozens of horses, donkeys, goats, sheep, pigs, and more animals rescued from slaughterhouses, and chickens, cats, dogs, geese and so on. Her militancy and activism led her to confront not only corporations and governments (with the consequent death threats), but also with colleagues from show business. In 2006 Bardot celebrated his birthday with an open letter addressed to Sophia Loren in which he asked as a gift to stop wearing furs. It wasn’t the first time Bardot had attacked Loren for her style: in the mid-1990s he accused her of “using a cemetery on her back,” to which Loren never responded. But Brigitte also has her dark side. Since 1992 she has been married to Bernard d’Ormale, an entrepreneur and former adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the National Front, the country’s far-right party. It seems that although the activist has infinite love for all animals, with humans it is not the same case. According to Bardot, although humanity thinks it has evolved it remains basic, cruel and barbaric, and anyone who is not vegan is a form of cannibal.
His particular worldview is not limited to food. Several of his books have generated controversy and repudiation for his ultra-conservative expressions. In “The Square of Pluto” (“Le Carré de Pluto”), his 1999 memoir, he criticized a Muslim festival (in which a ritual was performed with sheep slaughter) saying that France was again “invaded by overcrowding of foreigners, especially Muslims.” By her sayings she was ordered to pay a fine of thirty thousand francs for inciting hate of race, the third of the style for her (the previous ones were in 1997 and 1998). In his book “A Scream in Silence” (“Un cri dans le silence”) published in 2003 he defines LGBTQ members as “cheap putos and circus freaks” and the unemployed as people who “only accept jobs on the black market and live off the silver of the i “Ms.” Nor were the schools saved: for Bardot they are “dens full of drug dealers, clubs of young terrorists and condom users.”
But there is no judicial or social conviction to detain Brigitte. This year she was denounced for inciting race hatred for writing an open letter to the authorities of the French island of Réunion (in the Indian Ocean), in which she called its inhabitants “wild degenerates” for the way they treat animals.” The natives have retained their wild genes. They are degenerates still involved with ancient barbaric traditions.”” Life is made only of the best and the worst, of love and hate,” he once said, which is why he seems to have no resentment or remorse. His life is not based on what he was but on his eternal fight for a better future for animals that, you know, will probably never come. In this note:
