Regrets & REDEMPTION
FAME, MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD DIDN’T MAKE HER HAPPY, BUT SHE FOUND HER CALLING HELPING ANIMALS
In 1987, Brigitte Bardot stood basking in a five-minute standing ovation. But the French film star wasn’t at the Oscars. She was auctioning off her most treasured possessions — among them, an 8.36-carat diamond ring and a $17,000 Cartier bracelet — to benefit her animal-protection charity. “I gave my youth and beauty to men,” Brigitte, then 52, said. “Now I give my wisdom and experience to animals.”
It’s been almost 50 years since Brigitte, now 87, retired from movies, but her private life has often been rich with drama. Raised in a privileged Parisian family, Brigitte started modeling when she was a teen, which led to meeting photographer Roger Vadim. She married him at age 18 and he directed her in 1956’s And God Created Woman, which catapulted her to fame.
Brigitte famously inspired the term “sex kitten” with her cascading blonde hair, pouty lips and voluptuous curves. “Not since the Statue of Liberty has a French girl lit such fires in America,” gushed Life magazine. The international adoration was “the kind of paradox of celebrity,” Ginette Vincendeau, author of Brigitte Bardot and Brigitte Bardot: The Life, the Legend, the Movies, tells Closer. “She genuinely resented the exposure at the same time that she wanted it.”
A VERY PRIVATE AFFAIR
Brigitte’s life took a even harder turn when she began a romance with Jacques Charrier, her costar in Babette Goes to War, after her marriage to Roger ended. While shooting the World War II-set comedy, the 25-year-old actress became pregnant. She reluctantly wed Jacques in 1959, but pregnancy made her miserable. “I looked at my flat, slender belly in the mirror like a dear friend upon whom I was about to close a coffin lid,” she wrote her 1996 memoir Initiales B.B. Scared and desperate, Brigitte tried to induce a miscarriage by punching herself in the stomach.
Her situation became even more dire as the press closed in. “I couldn’t take a walk. I couldn’t go out... I couldn’t even go to have my baby in a hospital,” Brigitte said. After she gave birth at home to son Nicolas in 1960, Jacques objected to Brigitte’s desire to return to work. “He wanted her to be a mother and look after the child,” says Vincendeau.
Feeling trapped in her marriage to Jacques, whom she claimed was abusive, Brigitte attempted suicide by cutting her wrists and swallowing sleeping pills. She survived and her doctors diagnosed her with acute depression.
The couple divorced in 1962 with Jacques awarded custody of Nicolas, who was raised by the actor’s family. “I didn’t bring up Nicolas because I needed support, roots,” Brigitte said later. “I couldn’t be Nicolas’ roots because I was completely uprooted, unbalanced, lost in that crazy world….” Over the decades, she and Nicolas had intermittent contact but never established a close relationship. Her son and ex-husband successfully sued Brigitte for damages after she released her tell-all memoir.
It took many years, but Brigitte has at last found peace and purpose in her life. Married to former businessman Bernard d’Ormale since 1992, she resides at La Madrague, a secluded property in St. Tropez she’s owned for over 60 years. She’s discovered the happiness and fulfillment that eluded her in her early marriages and motherhood through her work on behalf of animals. “I’m happier in my routine life today,” Brigitte says, “than when I was chased after by 100 photographers.”