Happy Birthday Brigitte Bardot — Iconic Actress Celebrates Her 87th Birthday

Sep 28, 2021 by apost team

Brigitte Bardot rose to fame following her role in 1956's "And God Created Woman." After numerous other successes, the beloved actress, however, decided to quit acting and disappear from the screen in 1974 to focus on her activism for animal rights, something she has been doing for the past 47 years. Today, the former actress turned 87.

According to Biography, Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born on September 28th, 1934, in Paris, France. She was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family. As France Today writes, her father's main job was as an industrialist, but he also was a poet and an amateur filmmaker on the side, while her mother was interested in fashion and ballet. Like her mom, Bardot was also interested in ballet. As a teenager, she studied ballet at the National Superior Conservatory of Paris for Music and Dance.

The family lived a lavish life. Besides extravagant holidays spent in the Alps, on the Atlantic coast, Saint-Tropez and the like, their regular life involved rotating their time between their apartment on the Rue de la Pompe, in the elegant 16th arrondissement of Paris, and then to their cottage in Louveciennes, west of Paris on the weekends. Despite their riches, Bardot's parents did not spoil her or her sister. "My parents gave me a strict upbringing, which at times has caused me to suffer distress but today I am grateful to them for it," she said.

The classic beauty does not have social media accounts. Still, today on her 87th birthday, we take the time to look back on her life and achievements while wishing the famous star a happy birthday.

Bardot was affectionately nicknamed "BB" from her initials. It is also reminiscent of bébé, which means baby in French. The nickname proved apt as she catapulted to fame for portraying sexually emancipated personae in the 1960s after her role in "And God Created Woman." Bardot was 22 years old at that time. Bardot's first marriage was to Roger Vadim, the very man that shot Bardot to fame as the director of "And God Created Woman." According to The New York Times, Bardot was just 16 years old when they met. They married in 1952 when Vadim was 24 years old and when Bardot was 18. Bardot's strict parents were against their relationship at first as Bardot was underage. But her parents eventually let them pursue the relationship but did not allow her to get married until she turned 18.

"I wanted to show a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved in the way a boy might, without any sense of guilt on a moral or sexual level," Vadim had said about the film where Bardot played a woman who gets married to be freed from life in an orphanage. The couple would eventually divorce five years later in 1957. Vadim died aged 72 in 2000 after losing his battle with cancer.

Bardot went on to star in more films and even had the opportunity to meet with Queen Elizabeth and fellow global icon, Marilyn Monroe: "I find her wonderful," Bardot said of Monroe. "She's a woman who was exploited whom no one understood. I think that's what eventually killed her." But in 1973, at the height of her career, she abandoned her stardom to dedicate her life to animal rights activism, according to The Guardian.

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On giving up her life as a highly successful actress, Bardot said: "The majority of great actresses met tragic ends. When I said goodbye to this job, to this life of opulence and glitter, images and adoration, the quest to be desired, I was saving my life."

She goes on to describe being a celebrity as "suffocating." In her book Tears of Battle: An Animal Rights Memoir, Bardot says humans inflict suffering and evil upon themselves for their own selfish needs and writes about how she found peace with animals and nature. In 1986, she founded the La Fondation Brigitte Bardot (FBB), (The Brigitte Bardot Foundation).

According to their website, the FBB fights against the captivity of wild animals, the cruelty of fur, hunting, poaching, blood sports, whaling and seal hunting, amongst other things. In February 2019, Bardot talked about the achievements of her foundation, saying:

"We have financed the construction of a wild animal hospital in Chile, as well as a park to care for mistreated bears in Bulgaria, for koalas in Australia, for elephants in Thailand, and for horses in Tunisia. If the foundation wasn't active, a great many species conservation programmes would be non-existent."

In 2015, the former actress even wrote a letter to Karl Lagerfeld's cat, Choupette, 'asking' her to make her owner aware of the plight of animals in the fur trade.

"It was my way of highlighting Karl Lagerfeld's incoherence," she said. "He bends over backwards for his cat but doesn't care an ounce for all the animals sacrificed for his collections, for this most futile and vulgar of fashions. Fur is not luxury: it is an industry of death and suffering. We must boycott fur coats, as well as all the accessories."

Happy birthday Brigitte Bardot!

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