French movie actress Brigitte Bardot, whose sexy 1950s and ’60s look defined beauty for generations of men and women and who later became a world-renowned animal rights activist, has died at age 91.
Her foundation shared the news Sunday with an announcement on their website and a statement to French press. It did not specify when she died or her cause of death. However, Bardot has been hospitalized in October with a “serious illness.”
Bardot first came to fame when she was featured on the cover of Elle in 1950. She was 15. It was be the first of hundreds of times she graced the front of a fashion magazine.
Movie director Roger Vadim discovered her through those pictures, and he and Bardot married in 1952, when she was around 18 years old.
Bardot soon began appearing in movies, and starred in Vadim’s 1956 hit “…And God Created Woman,” a drama that featured her nude, cementing Bardot’s “sex kitten” image.
A natural brunette — evident in early modeling shoots — Bardot’s signature hair color arrived on the scene when an Italian director asked her to appear as a blonde, a color she fell for and ultimately adopted as her own.
She and Vadim divorced in 1957. Bardot was married a second time to film producer, actor and artist Jacques Charrier from 1959 to 1962, and a third to German photographer and documentarian Gunter Sachs from 1966 to 1969. Those marriages also ended in divorce.
“Brigitte Bardot was one of the first women to be really modern and treat men like love objects, buying them and discarding them. I like that,” said Andy Warhol, who did a series of screen prints of the screen siren in 1974.
Her fame paralleled that of fellow Warhol subject Marilyn Monroe, though Bardot’s movies weren’t as well-known to American audiences. “La Vérité,” in which she played a woman tried for killing her lover, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1961.
Many of her films were fluff. She starred in 1964′s “Agent 38-24-36,” in which she played the girlfriend of Anthony Perkins’ bumbling Russian spy in Cold War London.Bardot made around 40 movies before deciding in 1971 to pack it in, at age 39.
She wed businessman and movie producer Bernard d’Ormale in 1992 — a union that lasted to her death.
After retirement from film, Bardot became involved in animal rights activism and became a vegetarian. Her lobbying against seal hunting helped lead the European Union to ban the import of seal products.
The BAFTA nominee was found guilty four times for inciting racial hatred, in addition to her 2008 conviction for provoking discrimination and racial hatred against Muslims, an offense for which she was fined over $23,000.
Like many of her contemporaries, including fellow French actress Catherine Deneuve, Bardot enjoyed male flattery, and scorned the #MeToo movement of the late 2010s.
Most actresses complaining of sex harassment are “hypocritical, ridiculous, irrelevant,” Bardot said in a January 2018 interview with the magazine Paris Match.
“I found it lovely to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass,” Bardot said. “This kind of compliment is nice.”
“But there are many actresses who tease with the producers in order to get a role,” she said. “Then … they come to tell that they were harassed … In reality, they profit from it rather more than it hurt them.”
IN the summer of 2023, at age 88, Bardot was placed under brief observation for what her husband described as difficulty breathing as she “can no longer bear the heat.”
In fall 2025, after releasing French ABC book “Mon BBcédaire,” around her 91st birthday, Bardot was hospitalized for three weeks after she reportedly underwent “surgery in the context of a serious illness.”
“All my life … I was never what I wanted to be, which was frank, honest, and straightforward,” she told Vanity Fair in a 2012 interview.
“I wasn’t scandalous — I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be myself. Only myself.”