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Last update:16/7/17

Brigitte Bardot arrived in St Tropez, all ‘succulent pout and legs long like golden rope’, with her then husband, the director Roger Vadim, to film ‘And God Created Woman’ in 1956. Bardot walked on to that hot crisp sand by the waterfront in the old town, the Port des Pecheurs, a relative unknown. She emerged from its warm mirrored sea an icon of female sexuality, a totem to erotica. Like the siren she looked, her lure was powerful and immediate, attracting photographers and playboys, film stars, producers and those that sought fame and counsel with the famous. Twelve years later, when she walked up a St Tropez red carpet on the arm of Sean Connery for the premiere of their western ‘Shalako’, she was ready to turn her back on an acting career that had propelled her to stardom. It would take another five years but in 1973, she slipped away from the limelight at the comparatively early age of thirty eight.

Jean Cocteau perhaps summed Bardot up best when he said “I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is composed of truths that become lies, mythology of lies that become truths”. The previous seventeen years had nearly killed her. It was time to park the myth and face reality.

When Bardot appeared on the cover of ‘Elle’ magazine at the age of fifteen, she was already the epitome of grace and style. She was demure, she was a Catholic, she was all curves, and yet her body was toned and strong; an athlete’s build sculpted by intense sessions of entrechats, a balletic jump in which the dancer crosses the feet a number of times whilst in the air. She had an intense ‘kittenish’ appeal, but I must confess I would never have personally described her as beautiful.

The innocent young lady grew, in just a few years, into a sex symbol. In 1957, age 23, she made cinematic history in ‘And God Created Woman’, her husband Roger Vadim’s seminal film, where her exploding sensuality is as graceful as ever, and never lewd. In the movie, she plays Juliette, a seductive young woman with an indecisive heart and an unbridled appetite for pleasure. She attracts the attention of all of St. Tropez, including the wealthy Eric Carradine, Antoine Tardieu, and his sweet yet naïve brother, Michel, who all fight for her affections. In one notable scene, she dances as if in a trance, barefoot, her skin glowing with sweat, her hair wild and loose. Her thighs, that of a dancer, are tanned, strong and muscular. She is so far from the neat and constructed image of Hollywood stars of the time that, when the film was released in America, it provoked outrage on a continental scale. When they saw those pearls of sweat, American men went wild. Movie managers daring to show such a film were prosecuted, the film was banned in some states and newspaper articles denounced the depravity of it all. As a result, the film proved an even greater box-office success and the furore travelled back to Europe.

In her memoir (2019), she lamented the destructive nature of celebrity, saying it suffocated her and robbed her of the ability to go anywhere without being approached by strangers, some of whom wanted to embrace and touch her.

“I know what it feels like to be hunted,” she says.

Singling out screen legends such as Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich, who died alone, she said: “The majority of great actresses met tragic ends. When I said goodbye to this job, to this life of opulence and glitter, images and adoration, the quest to be desired, I was saving my life.”