Brigitte Bardot

Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot (Paris, September 28, 1934) is a French actress, singer, writer, currently retired from show business and the media, recognized for being a fashion icon. and sex symbol of the mid-20th century, animal rights activist, founder and president of the foundation that bears his name.

Her career as an actress began in 1952. Her first success was starring in And God Created Woman directed by Roger Vadim in 1957, which gained international recognition and although it is not her first film, it is widely recognized as the vehicle that managed to bring it into the public spotlight. She then starred in Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Le Mépris. For her role in the film Viva Maria! (1965), directed by Louis Malle, she was nominated at the BAFTA Awards for Best Foreign Actress.

Bardot retired from the entertainment industry in 1973. He acted in 47 films, also in several musicals and recorded more than 60 songs. She was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1985, but she refused to accept it. After retiring from her, she became an animal rights activist. During the 2000s, she sparked controversy by criticizing immigration and Islam in France and has been fined five times for inciting racial hatred. Today, she remains a major icon of popular culture.

Biography

Childhood

Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris on September 28, 1934. She initially lived in the third district, in a bourgeois environment. She is the daughter of Louis Pilou Bardot (1896-1975) and Anne-Marie Mucel (1912-1978). Her father was a businessman originally from Ligny-en-Barrois, Lorraine (France), owner of a company called Usines Bardot (owned by Air Liquide), based on Vineuse street in the city of Paris. Her mother, known as "Toty" spent her childhood in Italy. Brigitte and her younger sister, Marie-Jeanne (called Mijanou), born May 5, 1938, received a strict upbringing. From an early age, Bardot suffered from amblyopia, which prevented him from seeing out of her left eye.

During the course of her childhood, she became a girl with a passion for ballet and classical dance. At the age of seven she entered Madame Bougart's dance school.^{[citation needed]}

Early Years

In 1947, Bardot was admitted to the Conservatorio Nacional Superior de Música y Danza, despite rigid student selection and a limited number of places. For three years she attended the ballet classes of Jeanne Schwartz and later the Russian choreographer Boris Knyazev. She also studied with Leslie Caron, who later became famous for the film American in Paris (1951) with the participation of Gene Kelly. According to the recollection of her fellow student, Brigitte was graceful and plastic, but at the same time slow, not too strong and not hardworking. Karon believed that Bardot could have become a "beautiful" dancer; if she worked harder in the classroom. Knyazev was not only a first-class teacher, but also a real tyrant: he beat negligent students with a whip, and Brigitte often got more than the rest. Karon recalled that "Knyazev usually walked around the class with a battery in his hands, and if the girl did not meet her requirements, he did not hesitate to use it." However, it was thanks to Knyazev and her stern exactness that Bardot learned to move gracefully, she developed a bendable figure and created her famous gait in the future.

At the beginning of the 1948 season, Leslie Caron and several other girls from Knyazev's class received an invitation to the "Ballet on the Champs-Élysées." Brigitte watched from behind the scenes, as she rehearses a group, and so she took craft lessons. One of the theater directors, Jean Robin, remembered the girl well: «She was between 13 and 14 years old. She reminded me of a stalk, tall and so thin, far from beautiful and terribly shy. She was afraid to even utter a word. Bardot never received an invitation to join the company, which the next year toured Egypt. Later, a friend of Bardot's parents, Christian Foy, the principal dancer of the "Ballet on the Champs-Élysées", invited her to go with her group on her tour to the city of Fougères and Rennes. Thus, for the first time, Bardot had the opportunity to perform with a professional ballet company. Back in Paris, she continued to attend Knyazev classes.

Career

Brigitte is considered an erotic myth and sex-symbol of the 1950s and 1960s. Her great beauty and natural sensuality began to show in adolescence, the stage in which she appeared for the first time in the cinema: she was 18 years old, It was 1952 and it was about the film Le trou normand. That same year, she married the first of her four husbands, film director Roger Vadim. It would be one of her films directed by her first husband, Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956) that would launch her to fame at the hands of Jean-Louis Trintignant. One of the scenes starring Bardot shows her character dancing barefoot on a table and is considered one of the most erotic scenes in film history.

Bardot is one of the few European actresses to receive the attention of the American media. Every time she made a public appearance in the United States, she was hounded by a horde of journalists who took note of her every move.

Bardot in Venice in 1958

In 1954, he made his first film in the United States, Un acte d'amour, co-starring Kirk Douglas. In 1965 she portrayed herself in the film Dear Brigitte with James Stewart. However, due to her limited English, the actress was dubbed in many of her films.

In 1974, just after his 40th birthday, Bardot announced his retirement from the screens, after having starred in close to fifty films and recorded several albums, one of them, the one that obtained the best reviews, with the bad boy of French music, Serge Gainsbourg.

Since then, Bardot has dedicated himself to promoting animal rights. In 1986 she created the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of endangered animals.

During the 1990s she created controversy by criticizing immigration, Islamization and Islam in France, and has been fined five times for "inciting racial hatred."

In 2010 the Independent Ecologist Alliance party offered her to run for the French Presidency.

In January 2013, he announced that he would ask for Russian nationality, as Gérard Depardieu did, if the authorities in his country sacrificed two sick elephants, as Brigitte is an animal rights defender. Princess Stephanie of Monaco also declared herself against the sacrifice of this couple of elephants.

As a singer

In the movie Stars of the Future (1955) Bardot appears singing for the first time on screen. In the late 1950s, in Spain, Bardot bought a guitar and learned three chords. In the early 1960s, her friends, the artists Jean-Max Rivière and Claude Bolling advised her to be able to sing and record several songs. Eddie Barclay, owner of a large recording studio in France, where Bardot was recording on several occasions, had this to say about her abilities: "She didn't sing so much as counting a song. To tell the truth, her voice is rather weak. But God gave her the rare ability of her to bring a song to the listener and in fact, she means very seriously to blow up her career."

In 1960, Bardot released the pop album Behind Brigitte Bardot. Several more records by the actress were subsequently published, including Brigitte Bardot Sings (1963) [99] B.B en (1964) and Special Bardot (1968) (French and international publications have different names and an alternative list of compositions). Bardot sang songs in French, English and Spanish. After a vacation in Brazil with Bob Zaguri, returning to Paris, she recorded the song "Maria Nimguem" in Portuguese. Bardot sang songs in movies she starred in, including "Long Live Maria!", "Roma Boulevard," "Sea Doctor," "Future Stars," and others.

In 1967, Bob Zaguri became the producer of the musical show Unique Bardot ("Bardot Special"). It was a series of seventeen video clips of songs performed by herself, each of which told her short story. Among those songs was the famous "Harley Davidson", written by the French composer Serge Gainsbourg. Later Gainsbourg wrote a few more songs for Brigitte, some of them as a classic duet.

Consecration

And God created woman

Brigitte Bardot in 1961.

At the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, a true star, Brigitte Bardot, outshines Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, the greatest stars of the day, and her sex appeal moves La Croisette.

At the same time, Roger Vadim and Raoul Levy finished writing a screenplay titled Et Dieu... créa la femme. After not having been made due to lack of financial means, the film was filmed in Saint-Tropez. This production will allow Brigitte Bardot to enter the legend of world cinema and become a living myth, a social model and an international sex symbol.

Brigitte Bardot plays the role of Juliette Hardy, opposite Curd Jürgens, Christian Marquand and Jean-Louis Trintignant, with whom she enters into a union. Vadim, who is still her husband, defines the character of her that she plays: «He wanted, through Brigitte, to restore the climate of an era. Juliette is a girl from her time, who has freed herself from all feelings of guilt, from all the taboos imposed by society and whose sexuality is completely free. In pre-war literature and movies, she would have been compared to a prostitute. She is in this film a very young, generous, sometimes biased and ultimately elusive woman, with no other excuse for her generosity. The scenes are censored, especially that of a cunnilingus».

When it was released in France, the film was met with some reserve by critics and aroused hostility from conservative circles. Brigitte Bardot is mercilessly criticized for her slurred verb and articulation she deems questionable. Paul Reboux says of her that she has "the physique of a boniche and the way of speaking illiterate." Raoul Levy and Roger Vadim decide to exploit the film abroad and hope that it will be a success. Later she succeeded in the United States and Bardot became one of the most famous French women in North America. The North Americans even invented the term bardolâtrie to describe the enthusiasm that she came to generate. The film then goes on sale in France and is a resounding triumph. Cinemonde writes: "Sex appeal is Marlene Dietrich, glamor is Ava Gardner, Brigitte Bardot mixes all these explosive ingredients, adds a touch of personal fantasy."

Commitment to animal rights

Relation to seal hunts (1973-1978)

For three consecutive years, at her own expense, Brigitte Bardot worked for animal welfare. She was a spokesperson for the SPA (Société pour la prévention de la cruauté envers les animaux / Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) and began to carry out projects for abandoned dogs on the streets. She subsequently allied herself with Allain Bougrain-Dubourg.

In early 1976, he joined forces with Brian Davis, who held a position at IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare), and created a campaign to denounce the seal hunt after seeing a documentary on the subject. This practice is traditional among the Inuit, who are in the Arctic region, in order to obtain meat, skin, fat (or oil) and bones from animals. Seal hunting allowed some 15,000 fishing families to be fed for seven months.

What the actress condemned was the methods used by the hunters, who generally attacked calves a few days old, which were stripped of their skins while still conscious in some cases. Bardot led a demonstration outside the Norwegian embassy and did shake public opinion, but not enough to change the minds of those responsible for the hunt.

On March 15, 1977, French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing banned the importation of seal skins into France. On March 20, 1977, Bardot, still a star in the eyes of the world, headed to Canada to denounce the hunting of seal pups for their fur. He then started a fight that would change his life. His trip lasted five days under unprecedented pressure from the media. Upon his arrival, he berated the hunters and yelled at them "murderous Canadians," later adding at a press conference:

«If I am here, it is not for tourism or to be photographed as at the Festival de Cannes [...] We are here to find a solution to the problem globally and pray, both Mr. Weber like me, and the whole world, that the Canadian government finds a solution to this problem. Anyway, whatever happens, the seal is in danger of extinction [...] It should be said that, although seal hunting has been carried out for about 300 years, traditions are changing and only fools do not change their minds. » Brigitte Bardot, Press Conference in Canada of 1977.

Brigitte Bardot in 2002

In her work as an activist, Bardot has been supported by other famous people such as Isabelle Adjani, Kim Basinger, Tippi Hedren, Ursula Andress and Johnny Hallyday.

Personal life

Romance

On December 21, 1952, at the age of eighteen, Bardot married director Roger Vadim. They divorced in 1957, after less than five years of marriage; They had no children together, but they kept in touch and even collaborated on later projects. The stated reason for the divorce was Bardot's affairs with two other men. While married to Vadim, Bardot had an affair with Jean-Louis Trintignant, who co-starred with her in Et Dieu... créa la femme . Trintignant at the time was married to actress Stéphane Audran. The two lived together for about two years, spanning the period before and after Bardot's divorce from Vadim, but never married. Their relationship was complicated by Trintignant's frequent absence due to military service and Bardot's affair with the musician Gilbert Bécaud.

In early 1958, her divorce from Vadim was quickly followed by her breakup with Trintignant and a reported nervous breakdown in Italy, according to newspaper reports. A suicide attempt using sleeping pills was also noted two days earlier, but was denied by her PR manager. She recovered in a matter of weeks and began an affair with actor Jacques Charrier. She became pregnant long before they were married on June 18, 1959. Bardot's only child, son Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, was born on January 11, 1960. After she and Charrier divorced in 1962, Nicolas grew up in the family Charrier and had little contact with his biological mother until his adulthood.

Brigitte Bardot in Brazil in 1964.

Bardot's third marriage was to German millionaire playboy Gunter Sachs, and lasted from July 14, 1966, to October 1, 1969. In 1968, she began dating Patrick Gilles, who co-starred with her in &# 34;The Bear and the Doll" (1970); but she ended their relationship in the spring of 1971.

In the following years, Bardot dated bartender and ski instructor Christian Kalt, then club owner Luigi Rizzi, musician (later producer) Bob Zagury, singer Serge Gainsbourg, writer John Gilmore in succession. and the actors Warren Beatty and Laurent Vergez, her co-star in If Don Juan Were a Woman. The longest of these relationships was with the sculptor Miroslav Brozek; she lived with him from 1975 to December 1979 and posed for some of his sculptures. After breaking up with Brozek, she was in a long-term relationship with French television producer Allain Bougrain-duBourg.

Connection with Marine Le Pen

Bardot's fourth and current husband is Bernard d'Ormale, former adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen and former leader of the right-wing National Front party (Rassemblement national since June 2018); they were married on August 16, 1992. Bardot expressed her support for Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, calling her "the Joan of Arc of the 21st century" . She endorsed Le Pen in the 2012 and 2017 French presidential elections.

Health

In 1974, celebrating her 40th birthday, Bardot appeared in a nude photo shoot in Playboy magazine. On September 28, 1983, her forty-ninth birthday, Bardot overdosed on sleeping pills or sedatives with red wine. They had to rush her to the hospital, where she saved her life after using a stomach pump to evacuate the pills from her body. Bardot is also a breast cancer survivor.

Filmography

Brigitte Bardot Sculpture in Búzios (Brazil)

Discography

Bardot dabbled in music, especially in the 1960s.

Albums

• 1963: Brigitte Bardot (Philips)
• 1963: Brigitte (Philips)
• 1964: B.B. (Philips)
• 1968: Brigitte Bardot Show (Disc'AZ)
• 1970: The Lost 70's Album (Mercury)

Compiled

• 1981: I'll tell him d'or (Disc'AZ)
• 1995: The Early Years (Discomagic)
• 1996: Best of BB (Philips)
• 1998: Brigitte Bardot - CD Livre (Vade Retro, book and CD)
• 2004: The Best of Bardot (Mercury)

Video

• Divine B.B. Brigitte Bardot (DVD) - Mercury, 2004 (Songs interpreted by B. Bardot)

Books

Brigitte Bardot has written five books:

• Noonoah: Le petit phoque blanc (Grasset, 1978)
• Initals BB (autobiography, Grasset and Fasquelle, 1996)
• Le Carré de Pluton (Grasset and Fasquelle, 1999)
• A Cri Dans Le Silence (Du Rocher Editions, 2003)
• Pourquoi? (Du Rocher Editions, 2006)