Cinema icon Brigitte Bardot is to be buried in a graveyard in her hometown of Saint-Tropez, an official said Monday, as France wrestles with how to pay tribute to a cultural legend who in later years championed far-right views.
Bardot, who died on Sunday aged 91 after decades as an animal rights campaigner, had said she wanted to be laid to rest in her garden with a simple wooden cross on her grave — like those of her pets.
“I’d rather be there than in the Saint-Tropez cemetery, where a crowd of idiots might damage the graves of my parents and grandparents,” she told Le Monde newspaper in 2018.
Despite her wishes, an official at the Saint-Tropez town hall said the plan is for her to be laid to rest in the town’s seaside cemetery, without giving a date for the funeral.
Bardot shot to fame in her early twenties in the 1956 film, “And God Created Woman,” and went on to appear in about 50 films, but turned her back on cinema in 1973 to throw herself into fighting for animal welfare.
Her anti-immigration views and embrace of the far rig, ht howe, ver stirred controversy.
Bardot was convicted five times for hate speech, mostly about Muslims, but also about the inhabitants of the French island of Reunion, whom she described as “savages”.
She passed away before dawn on Sunday morning with her fourth husband, Bernard d’Ormale, a former adviser to the far right, by her side.
“She whispered a word of love to him… and she was gone,” Bruno Jacquelin, a representative of her foundation for animals, told BFM television.
Cynicism
Right-wing politicians paid gushing tributes to the film star, but leftists were more reserved, given her racist remarks in later years.
President Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, hailed the actor as a “legend” of 20th-century cinema who “embodied a life of freedom”.
Three-time presidential candidate Marine le Pen, whose far-right National Rally party is riding high in the polls, called her “incredibly French: free, untameable, whole”.
Bardot backed Le Pen for president in 2012 and 2017, describing her as a modern “Joan of Arc” she hoped could “save” France.
Conservative politician Eric Ciotti called for a national farewell like the one organised in 2018 for French rock legend Johnny Hallyday. He started a petition online that had garnered more than 9,000 signatures on Monday afternoon.
But Socialist party leader Olivier Faure was against the idea, saying such public tributes were for people who had rendered “exceptional services to the nation”.
“Brigitte Bardot was an iconic actor of the New Wave. She was radiant and left her mark on French cinema,” he said.
“But she also turned her back on (French) republican values and was several times convicted for racism,” he added.
Communist party leader Fabien Roussel said at least all could agree she made French cinema “shine throughout the world”.
But Greens lawmaker Sandrine Rousseau was more critical.
“To be moved by the fate of dolphins but remain indifferent to the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean — what level of cynicism is that?” she quipped on BlueSky.
Fame To ‘Protect Animals’
Born on September 28, 193, in Paris, Bardot was raised in a well-to-do traditional Catholic household.
Married four times, she had one child, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, with her second husband, actor Jacques Charrier.
After quitting the cinema, Bardot withdrew to her home in Saint-Tropez to devote herself to animal rights.
Her calling apparently came when she encountered a goat on the set of her final film, “The Edifying and Joyous Story of Colinot”. To save it from being killed, she bought the animal and kept it in her hotel room.
“I’m very proud of the first chapter of my life,” she told AFP in a 2024 interview ahead of her 90th birthday.
“It gave me fame, and that fame allows me to protect animals — the only cause that truly matters to me.”
AFP
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