Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born in 1934 in the seizième, in Paris, not too far from the Eiffel Tower. Her family was well-connected, straight-laced, and Catholic. Louis Bardot, her father, was a well-to-do businessman. Her mother, who had been a model known as “Toty,” didn’t much care for her daughters, Brigitte and her younger sister, Mijanou.
One day, the two sisters were playing under the drawing room table and managed to smash an antique Chinese vase on top of it. Bardot’s cold and distant mother was incensed. From that day on, they were to address her by the formal vous. “It was as if a wall, a barrier, had been erected,” Bardot later recalled, “that closed off the warmth of my childhood.”
Bardot started life in the public eye as a ballet dancer, showing considerable promise. She modeled hats, and later dresses, for the magazines. And then, in August 1953 (through the machinations of her mother), she was the Elle girl, photographed for their cover wearing a full-skirted dress (by the ready-to-wear brand Virginie) in pink and white gingham, which the French called toile de Vichy. She had wrist-length white gloves and was carrying a large-brimmed straw hat and a basket purse of wicker. With her then brunette hair pulled back and her fresh-faced looks, which are just a little knowing, this cover was a sensation.
Inside, the magazine showed her in full bella ragazza style: close-fitting sweaters or crisp shirts with full skirts to mid-calf, or tapered cropped trousers, worn with ballet flats. Bardot herself ordered flat shoes from Rose Repetto.
The filmmaker Marc Allégret, who had discovered Jean-Paul Belmondo, Michèle Morgan, and Louis Jourdan, among others, saw Bardot’s pictures. He sent his young protégé Roger Vadim (the son of a white Russian émigré) to see her. He was then 22 and he was bewitched. Her parents were horrified; in fact, Louis Bardot took a rifle to him. So they married in 1952, after she turned 18.
Bardot was initially cast in small roles (including as Dirk Bogarde’s love interest in 1955’s Doctor at Sea, a hit in the United Kingdom), but it was in 1956 that Bardot starred in the Vadim film …And God Created Woman (Et Dieu... créa la femme). In this she played, according to the film’s hype, “a demon-driven temptress… a young girl of today tormented by the desires that sweep her from a love she yearned for… set in the pagan paradise of the French Riviera.” Incidentally, she had a tempestuous affair with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant during the making of the movie. (Divorce from Roger Vadim followed swiftly afterwards.)
In the movie, she plays a happy-go-lucky teenager in then little-known Saint-Tropez, walking across Pampelonne Beach. The movie turned her into an international icon, as well as putting Saint-Tropez on the white-hot map. If you can keep up, Bardot fell in love with the singer Gilbert Bécaud (known as “Monsieur 100,000 Volts” for his electric performances). Trintignant, doing military service in Algeria, split up from Bardot as a result.
In 1958 she saw La Madrague, a house that was for sale on the water near Canebiers Beach. She bought it, and at the beginning she threw wild parties that made Saint-Tropez the happening place—Jean-Paul Belmondo, Sacha Distel, Alain Delon, and more came.
“A saint would sell his soul to the devil to see Bardot dance,” said Simone de Beauvoir, who described her in the 1959 article “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome” as the “locomotive of women’s history…She eats when she’s hungry and makes love as simply.”
In 1959, she married Jacques Charrier, and she chose a pretty gingham dress, flourished with cotton lace, by Jacques Esterel. (She had one child—a boy, Nicholas—with Charrier, writing in her memoirs that she felt nothing but repulsion for him: He was, she said, “the object of my misfortune.” So Charrier, whom she would soon divorce, gave Nicholas to his parents to bring him up—though Bardot and Nicholas reconnected later in life.)
Roles in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Vérité (1960), Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (1963), and Louis Malle’s Viva Maria! (1965), opposite Jeanne Moreau, proved that Bardot was an impressive performer, although she dismissed them all. “I was never a great actress,” she said—and indeed, in 1973, not long after her 39th birthday, she turned her back on movies for good. However, with her (now) blonde, tousled hair and triangular headscarves; her Saint-Tropez tan; her mini shorts; and her flat ballerines, she was and remained, in Simone de Beauvoir’s words, an icon of “absolute freedom.”