Brigitte Bardot, the icon of French cinema, has died at 91

Bardot! Bardot! Brigitte Bardot ! Who will claim that there was a woman more beautiful than her in the 20th century?^e century ? A more sensual, more radiant woman, a woman with the gait of a sylph – classical dance had given her an aristocratic silhouette -, a woman with an ideal body, all curves and voluptuous hairlines, a woman with the bearing of a queen, a magnetic woman instinctively awakening both men and women – because women loved Brigitte Bardot and generations imitated her. Woman as a child with her cat's face – at the end of her life, she looked like a very beautiful Persian, broad face, short nose, penetrating gaze -, irresistible woman with her pouting pout and her burst of mischievous laughter. Dream woman who capsized many of Roger Vadim's men to Serge Gainsbourg via Jean-Louis Trintignant, Sami Frey, Jacques Charrier, Günter Sachs, many others. Until the moment when she found the calm of a life far from the flashes or the cameras with Bernard d'Ormale whom she married in 1992. Happy with moments of doubt, to the point of crises and despair. But valiant, fighting, pugnacious and hyperactive in the defense of the animal cause. She is then tireless and never lacking in courage.

Brigitte Bardot left the cinema in 1973. In 2010, a large-scale exhibition was dedicated to her at the Museum of the Thirties in Boulogne-Billancourt. With all due respect to the curmudgeons who poured out sarcasm without even having crossed the threshold of the rooms, this event organized by Henry-Jean Servat and Tristan Duval had to be extended and attracted not only the nostalgic people of his generation, but a whole crowd of young men and women finally approaching this legend in the radiant splendor of its beauty and in the energy of its commitments. Because the sections devoted to his fight against the massacre of baby seals as well as to the Fondation for animals were among the most popular.

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Retired actress under forty with 46 films

It is with a very interesting filmography that she closed the “cinema” chapter of her life without regret. She was filming Colinot Trousse-Chemise under the direction of Nina Companeez. With a turban on her head, she welcomed her agent, her attentive godmother, Olga Horstig, and said to her: “What am I doing here with this thing on my head? I'm ridiculous. I won’t tour again.”

And she never made films again. So it was 1973 and she had made 46 films. She was not forty years old…

It took years to fully evaluate this path and understand the particularity of his playing. In the 1970s, despite his career, it was still fashionable to mock his playing, his drawling voice, his candor. She didn't care as much. She had started a career as a singer after her torrid 68 years spent at the Maison des arts, on the banks of the Seine in Paris, with her lover and Pygmalion at the time, Serge Gainsbourg.

The one who wasn't afraid to star in a film called A lovely idiot she knew where she was going. She was not aware of what she would leave in the history of cinema. She had fallen there very small, at the bottom, and had not been really happy there. Free, she didn't care much about what anyone said about her. No doubt she remembered, and that was enough for her, the look of Jean Anouilh brooding over the young premier of The Invitation to the CastleBrigitte Bardot's only escapade on stage.

A stunning beauty with extraordinary influence

Beautiful, beautiful, it is simply because she was staggeringly beautiful that Brigitte Bardot exerted an extraordinary influence at the heart of French society and the world. In spite of herself often, but also consciously sometimes. In the foreword to the book devoted to him by Henry-Jean Servat at the time of the exhibition, Brigitte Bardot: the legend (Ed. Hors Collection), she wrote: “Carried by a current that I could not control, my life turned upside down, shaking up everything that was my childhood and my education. » This current is that of an era. She did not come too late in a world too old. It's as if we had been waiting for it and, from the first covers of the Vigils orEllesomething had struck everyone: she was not like the others. She radiated. She was clear. The dance had exalted her goddess-like appearance, her queenly bearing. From that moment on, she had a dazzling smile, a full face and sensual lips. Beautiful, but not only that.

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Born on September 28, 1934, she grew up in a bourgeois family in upscale neighborhoods: very well brought up, Brigitte Bardot. We have to put ourselves back in time. Before the war, at a time when women were liberating themselves a little – “les Garçonnes”, flexible fashion – but where they remained essentially subject to the destiny, more often than not happy, of marrying and having children. Among the Bardots, education is strict. And the two girls, Brigitte and her sister Mijanou, are subjected to harsh punishments as soon as they do something stupid. At the same time, these parents, bourgeois as they may be, love the world of entertainment and frequent it. Papa Pilou, an industrialist, teases the muse and his mother dreams of opening a fashion house. Brigitte presents the models. This mother has Hélène Gordon-Lazareff as a friend. It is the latter which will be decisive in the path that the pretty Brigitte will take, beyond the “house” fashion shows!

She has brown hair. She dances. One of the prettiest photographs of the young Bardot represents her as a young dancer, between opera and cabaret… far from the little rat of which images also exist. And soon, quite naturally, fashion photos.

His father, just a few years later, wanted to ban posters of Manina, the girl without veils… film that she shot in 1952, the same year as the charming Norman hole by Jean Boyer with Bourvil! On one side, a nice little girl, on the other, a pin-up in a white bikini! Apocalypse of good families. But deep down, the Bardots are, as much as BB, representative of an evolution in French society in the 1950s. And it is with her family that she spends her vacations in Saint-Tropez. The village is still that of Colette and not that of the jet-set.

“Carried by a current”upset by an era, too. When we see again the scandal that could have been caused by this kind chronicle which is And God… created woman (1956) with Vadim, her first husband and her first Pygmalion, we cannot help but think of the impact of Bonjour sadness by Françoise Sagan, two years earlier.

But Bardot isn't just a beauty to be stripped bare – and then, she's not the first! Let us not forget, for example, Edwige Feuillère in Lucrezia Borgia – she is also rebellious, insolent, a girl who has a lot of wit and a sense of repartee. When New York discovers her, the replies fly. She's amazing. Her joy of living galvanizes her. But the pressures are terrible. Photographers, echo clerks. She is modest. She will not have an easy existence, but she remains silent about the deepest pains. She committed suicide in 1960, after filming Clouzot's Truthon the very day of his 26th birthday. This is where the “scandal” comes from. Not about the loves and even less about the filmography, let us repeat, which has long been considered excellent. No longer his game. Mocked for a time – his way of articulating: a legacy of childhood, when you have to speak clearly to hard-of-hearing dad… His game is his freedom. She breaks the codes.

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It is because she is not like the others that poets and intellectuals focus on her “case”. Who is this solar girl who brings millions of foreign currency to France, who all women imitate, who gives the feeling of freedom? The young Barthes explains it. “She is not more licentious but simply more liberated. It represents a more open eroticism, stripped of all these falsely protective substitutes which were the half-clothing, the makeup, the fade, the allusion, the flight.

She lives like everyone else while being like no one

Jean Cocteau

Cocteau loves it: “She lives like everyone else while being like no one.” Duras gets involved, learned. “From Japan to New York and vice versa, it represents the unacknowledged aspiration of the male human being, his virtual infidelity of a very particular order – that which would incline him towards the opposite of his wife, towards the wax woman whom he could model, make and undo at will, up to and including death. We will call her by her real name, Queen Bardot.” François Nourissier devotes an entire book to him. With pictures! The most comical is that of the face-to-face with General de Gaulle. Aunt Yvonne doesn't want to see her at the Élysée. She comes all the same. In pants, operetta military jacket with frogs, trousers, undone hair! Total respect… The Great Charles: “Good simplicity. »

In 1968, the year began with the Bardot show… A sequence was cut. That of Bardot draped in a tricolor flag. But two years later, she was Marianne!

Five more years, rather happy, loving, mischievous. She begins to sing and displays her sensual charm and her wit. Serge Gainsbourg and Claude Bolling watch over the ultrasexy debutante. It's still running. She is irresistible in The Bear and the Doll with Jean-Pierre Cassel in 1969.

In 1981, a polling institute asked: “Which women have done the most for the image of France?” Simone Veil, who defended the law for the legalization of abortion in 1976 and whose glorious past we know, obtained 55% of the votes. Brigitte Bardot is right behind her at 40%. Yes, she did a lot for the image of France. She is a quintessential French woman, born in the 1930s in a bourgeois environment. She is ahead of her time. It opens the Trente Glorieuses.

Later, through poorly conducted interviews, clumsy books, and untimely declarations, she gave the image of herself as a reactionary, racist woman, indifferent to the fate of men. She wasn't like that. What if she did not understand the evolution of society over the past thirty yearsis that there were in her, in the depths of her being, the playful dreams of the wild beauty which dances to be dizzy in And God… created woman, a pure young girl, quite candid and completely innocent.