Brigitte Bardot (1934–2025): A controversial life seen through faith

French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot, died last week at the age of 91. Known for her prestigious acting career that revolutionised French cinema in the 1950s, she was also a passionate advocate for animal welfare, founding the Brigitte Bardot Foundation.

Growing up in a wealthy, strict Catholic family, Bardot spent her childhood mastering ballet and studying. A prize student, she won many awards. Eventually, her beauty earned her a place as Elle’s new glamorous cover girl in Paris, and later she recalled, “I was seeking something, perhaps a fulfillment of myself.”

With her striking looks and hour-glass figure, Bardot became known as a sex symbol

With her striking looks and hour-glass figure, Bardot became known as a sex symbol, personifying a new age in sexual liberation and shattering the way women were portrayed. Marrying film director Roger Vadim when she was 18, she starred in his debut film And God Created Woman, which shocked the world with scenes of female sexuality and a lack of inhibition alien to the moral normalities of the time.

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In the end the film was banned with the American majority labelling it as depraved. Paris-Match magazine even branded Bardot: “immoral from head to toe”. Despite appearances on the red carpet, the ruthless media, as usual, forgot that beneath her peroxide blond hair and curve-hugging bikini was a human with feelings. Life in the spotlight was brutal, toughening Bardot to the realities of showbusiness.

After running off with And God Created Woman co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant and divorcing Vadim, Brigitte married the actor Jacques Charrier and had a son, Nicolas (born 11th January 1960). Heartbreakingly, she despised her pregnancy, shockingly punching herself in the stomach and begging a doctor to induce a miscarriage: “I looked at my flat, slender belly in the mirror like a dear friend upon whom I was about to close a coffin lid,” Later in life, her son sued his mother for emotional damage when she said in her biography she would have preferred to “give birth to a little dog”.

After her second and third marriages ended, a list of lovers followed. While the world hungrily may desire the power and attention that comes from beauty, its shallow beckonings no longer satisfied, and Bardot grew frustrated with the way she was marketed as, one publication put it, “the princess of pout and the countess of come hither.’’ She abandoned her career to campaign for animal rights in 1973, stating: “I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she said. “I’m going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.”

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Bardot’s drive and desire to be ‘taken seriously as an actress’ cost her dearly, as she was the highest-paid actress in France at the time. Despite Bardot’s comments about her pregnancy suggesting an unhealthy imbalance of perception of people and animals, walking away from an industry because it no longer aligned with her values and desires would be applauded by many women of the world today.

Once adored for her beauty and an icon for sexual freedom for women, Bardot aged, spending many of her later years in court due to incidents of racial hatred and homophobia, as part of her right-wing political views. Even though many of her life choices seemed to pivot Bardot away from rather than towards the open arms of her loving heavenly father, she only wanted what we all do, to be taken seriously, loved for who we are beyond skin-deep, and to make a difference.

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Bardot was a young woman deeply loved by God, searching for fulfillment.

Bardot was a young woman deeply loved by God, searching for fulfillment. The world couldn’t put her in a box, and she lived a courageous, uncontained, imperfect life. Although she was raised in a conservative Catholic environment, there was more discipline, punishment, and restraint than the grace and freedom that come with a relationship with Jesus through faith. Despite this, it seems her Catholic upbringing instilled in Bardot a moral compass and a desire to show compassion to God’s creatures and be a voice for the voiceless. Perhaps her belief in her ‘higher calling’ to protect animals was a substitute for a hunger for God and his ways and her passion for animal welfare may have come from lessons in compassion she learned from the Bible in her early years.

I pray that despite her troubled life, Brigette Bardot is with Jesus, who in his grace, died for all of us, ‘while we were still sinners’ (Romans 5:8). I also pray for her surviving family and friends, especially her son Nicolas Charrier and her sister Mijanou, that they may find comfort and ultimately salvation in Jesus.