French Actress Brigitte Bardot Dead at 91

Two months after undergoing surgery, French actress and animal rights advocate Brigitte Bardot died at her home in Southern France. She was 91.

An icon of the screen has passed.

Brigitte Bardot—a French actress and singer who became a symbol of the 20th century’s sexual revolution—has died. She was 91.

“The Brigitte Bardot Foundation announces with immense sadness the death of its founder and president, Madame Brigitte Bardot,” read the Dec. 28 statement to AFP, “a world-renowned actor and singer, who chose to abandon her prestigious career to dedicate her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation.”

Bardot died at her home in southern France, the foundation’s Bruno Jacquelin told The Associated Press. A cause of death was not revealed.

Bardot’s passing comes more than a month after the And God Created Woman star faced rumors about her declining health, leading her to set the record straight with a quippy post to social media.

“I don’t know which fool spread this fake news tonight about my passing,” she wrote, via translation, on X Oct. 22. “But rest assured that I’m doing well and have no intention of taking my final bow.”

Two years before her most recent hospitalization, the Love on a Pillow star’s husband Bernard d’Ormale reported that she had been struggling to breathe.

“It was around 9 o’clock when Brigitte had trouble breathing,” d’Ormale told Var-Matin back in 2023. “It was stronger than usual, but she didn’t lose consciousness… the fireman came and gave her oxygen and then stayed to monitor her.”

d’Ormale—who wed Bardot in 1992—speculated that the July heat was the leading cause of the incident, adding, “Like all people of a certain age, she can no longer stand the heat.”

Though Bardot’s time on screens was brief in the context of her life, it was unforgettable. After a childhood training as a ballerina in Paris, Bardot—often referred to simply by her initials, B.B.—began her acting career in 1952 after appearing on the cover of Elle at 18.

But while her early years on screen earned her small roles, it wasn’t until her portrayal of Juliette Hardy in 1956’s And God Created Woman that she truly became an international star. Her popularity soared in part due to the raciness of many of her roles, earning her the nickname the “sex kitten.”

Of why the actress became such an international sensation, a 1958 article for LIFE mused, “In gaining her present eminence, Brigitte Bardot has had certain advantages beyond those she was born with. Like the European sports car, she has arrived on the American scene at a time when the American public is ready, even hungry, for something racier and more realistic than the familiar domestic product.”

Other films for which Bardot earned acclaim include 1960’s The Truth, 1963’s Le Mépris and 1965’s Viva Maria!, for which she earned a BAFTA nominee for Best Foreign Actress.

Her fame grew so global during that time that France’s then-President Charles de Gaulle called her “the French export as important as Renault cars.”

Philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir, meanwhile, referred to Bardot as a “locomotive of women’s history” in her 1960 essay “The Lolita Syndrome.”

But Bardot never saw her role in the film as anything so significant.

“All my life, during that film, and before and after,” she told Vanity Fair in 2012, “I was never what I wanted to be, which was frank, honest, and straightforward. I wasn’t scandalous—I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be myself. Only myself.”

And then, just as her star seemed to be on an exponential rise, Bardot announced her retirement from acting at age 39 in order to focus on animal rights activism.

“It’s what I dreamed of,” she explained. “It’s what I always wanted.”

Off the screen, Bardot married four times—including to exes Roger Vadim, Jacques Charrier and Gunter Sachs—living out the end of her life with husband d’Ormale, 84.

In looking back at her career, Bardot—mom to Nicolas-Jacques Charrier with her second husband—often seemed dismissive of the enduring legacy she left in her 20 years on screens. As she said in her 2012 interview, “If I upset some notions and went against established rules, that wasn’t part of what I wanted to do. It wasn’t my goal.”

And as she grew older, Bardot didn’t shy away from embracing each era of her life, including pondering its end.

“That’s not a fear at all because we can’t do anything about it,” she told Vogue after her 90th birthday in 2024. “It’s completely natural, it happens to everyone. We’re very young, we grow up, we age, and we die.”

She added, “But I’m not going to be anxious about it, because then it’d feel horrible.”