Brigitte Bardot was a very carnal incarnation of the new, sexually liberated woman, wrote film critics in the 1950s and 60s. (I understand your main interest is animals, said a flustered BBC interviewer. No, replied Bardot, my main interest is sex.) That was how Bardot, who has died aged 91, was sold as a film star but, in truth, she could have been a character from a novel by Colette, whose subject was always l'amour love as a transaction, or a madness, seldom a liberation.
Brigitte Bardot's image as a free spirit who defied convention made her a powerful symbol of women's liberation in the 1950s and '60s. That reputation was not just for the cameras and red carpets; it extended into her personal life and how she styled her homes. This was in sharp contrast to her upbringing as the sheltered older daughter of a bourgeois Parisian family, raised among period furniture, oriental rugs, and other markers of refinement.
