Hounded by photographers for years, Bardot identified with the animals she later set out to save

PARIS (AP) — Brigitte Bardot felt each pop of the flashbulb like the impact of a high-powered rifle bullet. And so it was, she said, that years of implacable hounding by the world’s paparazzi turned a woman idolized as a sultry sex kitten into a militant animal rights crusader.

Bardot, who died Sunday at age 91, was just 22 when she rocketed to international fame with the 1956 film sensation “And God Created Woman,” a cinematic ode to her hourglass figure, sultry pout and tousled blond mane.

Bardot would spend another decade and a half in the limelight — and among the paparazzi’s preferred prey, including just days before she gave birth — before she retired from the cinema to devote her life to protecting animals.

“I understand wild animals, under the fire of machine guns or hunters’ rifles, so well,” Bardot said in a 1982 interview. The paparazzi “didn’t shoot to kill, but they certainly killed something inside me by photographing me like that with their zoom lenses. They were like the arms of war, like bazookas.”

A sex symbol turned animal rights activist

Bardot earned the title of one of the greatest sex symbols of the 20th century after her teenage breakthrough role dancing naked on tables in “And God Created Woman,” directed by the first of her four husbands, Roger Vadim.

At the height of her cinema career, Bardot came to symbolize a nation bursting the seams of bourgeois respectability. Her tousled, blond mane, fabulous figure and pouty irreverence were among France’s most visible natural assets. Air France, the state-run air carrier, once used Bardot in an advertising campaign.

Bardot’s second career as animal rights activist was equally sensational. She traveled to the Arctic to blow the whistle on the slaughter of baby seals; she condemned the use of animals in laboratory experiments; and she vigorously opposed Muslim sheep-slaughtering rituals.

“Man is an insatiable predator,” Bardot told The Associated Press on her 73rd birthday in 2007. “I don’t care about my past glory. That means nothing in the face of an animal that suffers, since it has no power, no words to defend itself.”

Her activism earned her compatriots’ respect and, in 1985, she was awarded the Legion of Honor. Later, however, she fell from public grace as her animal protection diatribes took on a decidedly extremist ring.

She was convicted five times in French courts of inciting racial hatred, including for criticism of the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep during the annual Aid el-Kebir and Eid Al-Adha festivals.

Her fourth husband was Bernard d’Ormale, a one-time adviser to far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, also repeatedly convicted of racism. Bardot denied being racist, but frequently decried the influx of immigrants into France, especially Muslims.

Made famous by her first husband

Bardot was born Sept. 28, 1934, to a wealthy industrialist, studied classical ballet and was discovered by a family friend who put her on the cover of Elle magazine at the age of 14. She said her father was a strict disciplinarian who would sometimes “punish me with a horse whip.”

It was French movie producer Vadim, whom she married in 1952, who saw her potential and wrote “And God Created Woman” to showcase her provocative sensuality, an explosive cocktail of childlike innocence and raw sexuality.

The film, which portrayed Bardot as a bored newlywed who beds her brother-in-law, had a decisive influence on New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, and it came to embody the hedonism and sexual freedom of the 1960s.

The film was a box-office hit and it made Bardot a superstar. Her girlish pout, tiny waist and generous bustline were more appreciated than her talent. “It’s an embarrassment to have acted so badly,” Bardot said of her early films. “I suffered a lot in the beginning. I was really treated like someone less than nothing.”

Bardot’s unabashed, off-screen love affair with co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant further shocked the nation. It eradicated the boundaries between her public and private life and turned her into fair game for paparazzi who pursued her relentlessly.

Hounded by paparazzi

She never adjusted to the limelight and blamed the constant press attention for a suicide attempt shortly after the birth of her only child, Nicolas. Photographers broke into her house only two weeks before she gave birth to snap a picture of her pregnant.

Nicolas’ father was Jacques Charrier, a handsome French actor who never liked his role as Monsieur Bardot. Bardot soon gave up her son to his father, and later said she had been chronically depressed and unready for the duties of being a mother. “I was looking for roots then,” she said in an interview. “I had none to offer.”

In her 1996 autobiography, “Initiales B.B.,” she likened her pregnancy to “a tumor growing inside me,” and described Charrier as “temperamental and abusive.” Bardot married her third husband, West German millionaire playboy Gunther Sachs, in 1966. They divorced three years later.

Among her films were “A Parisian” (1957); “In Case of Misfortune,” in which she starred in 1958 with Jean Gabin, France’s Clark Gable; “The Truth” (1960); “Private Life” (1961); “A Ravishing Idiot” (1963); “A Happy Heart” (1967); “Shalako” (1968); “Women” (1969); “The Bear And The Doll” (1970); “Rum Boulevard” (1971); and “Don Juan” (1973).

The films were rarely complicated by plots and had little psychological depth. Most were vehicles to display Bardot in scanty dress or frolicking nude in the sun.

“It was never a great passion of mine,” she said of filmmaking. “And it can be deadly sometimes. Marilyn (Monroe) perished because of it.”

A new Bardot, revered but later reviled

Bardot retired to her Riviera villa in St. Tropez at the age of 39 in 1973 after “The Woman Grabber.” She emerged a decade later with a new persona: animal rights lobbyist, face wrinkled and voice deepened by years of heavy smoking.

She abandoned her jet-set life and sold off movie memorabilia and jewelry to create a foundation devoted exclusively to the prevention of animal cruelty.

Her activism knew no borders. She urged South Korea to ban the sale of dog meat and once wrote to then-U.S. President Bill Clinton asking why the U.S. Navy recaptured two dolphins it had released into the wild. She attacked centuries-old French and Italian sporting traditions including the Palio, a free-for-all horse race, and campaigned on behalf of wolves, rabbits, kittens and turtle doves.

Actress Pamela Anderson, also an animal rights activist, called Bardot “my mother of the heart and my absolute idol,” in an interview with the AP in 2008.

In 1997, several towns removed Bardot-inspired statues of Marianne — the bare-breasted statue representing the French Republic — after she voiced anti-immigrant sentiment. Also that year, she received death threats after calling for a ban on the sale of horse meat.

In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Bardot said in an interview that most actors protesting sexual harassment in the film industry were “hypocritical” and “ridiculous” because many played “the teases” with producers to land parts.

She said she had never had been a victim of sexual harassment and found it “charming to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass.”

Bardot once said she identified with the animals she tried to save.

“I can understand hunted animals because of the way I was treated,” she told an interviewer. “What happened to me was inhuman. I was constantly surrounded by the world press.”

——

Retired Associated Press correspondent Ganley contributed biographical material to this obituary.