"In the 1950s, before the sexual revolution, before the New Wave, before feminism, there was Bardot: she was sex, she was youth, and, more to the point, Bardot was modernity. She was the unacknowledged zeitgeist force that stirred cinema's young lions such as Francois Truffaut against the old order. Bardot was the country's most sensational cultural export; she was in effect the French Beatles, a liberated, deliciously shameless screen siren who made male American moviegoers gulp and goggle with desire"
"Bardot there was a time when it couldn't be pronounced without a knowing pout on the second syllable. French headline-writers loved calling the world's most desirable film star by her initials: BB, that is: bebe, a bit of weirdly infantilised tabloid pillow-talk. When Brigitte Bardot retired from the movies in the mid-70s, taking up the cause of animal rights and a ban on the import of baby seals,"
Brigitte Bardot emerged in the 1950s as an emblem of sex, youth, and modernity who reshaped cinematic taste and inspired young filmmakers like Francois Truffaut. She became France's most sensational cultural export, likened to the Beatles, and provoked strong reactions in more puritan cultures. Her on-screen persona combined liberated shamelessness with ingenuous charm, gentleness, and charisma that were often overshadowed by prurience and sexist condescension. After retiring in the mid-1970s she devoted herself to animal-rights campaigning, notably against seal imports. Later activism targeted halal meat and alleged Islamicisation, intensifying her polarizing public image.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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