French screen legend and cultural icon Brigitte Bardot passes away at the age of 91

Made for a relatively modest $40,000, “And God Created Woman” — directed and co-written by Ms. Bardot’s then-husband, director Roger Vadim — grossed $8.5 million worldwide and became, at the time, the most commercially successful foreign film ever released in the United States. And it made Ms. Bardot — a former Parisian ballerina and cover girl, and the rebellious daughter of a proper and prosperous Catholic family — a global movie star.

The very initials “B.B.” (pronounced bébé) inspired a cultlike devotion — Bardolatrie, it was called — and French President Charles de Gaulle declared her a “French export as important as Renault cars.” She became a model for official statues of Marianne, the national symbol of the French Republic. English-speaking audiences flocked to art-house cinemas to see what the Gallic fuss was about.

Ms. Bardot maintained a frenzied off-screen schedule that reinforced her wild-child image. She embarked on dozens of affairs and frolicked on sun-dappled Saint-Tropez, embodying a lifestyle of loose morals and tight bikinis. “Nobody has any security in loving me,” she once declared. When a reporter asked her to name the most memorable day of her life, she corrected him: “It was a night.”

With a few exceptions, notably Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963), her more than 40 films were forgettable attempts to cash in on the Bardot craze. To reviewers, she was decidedly less than met the eye. “Unlike her American opposite number, Miss Monroe, she has no lightness, no verve, no womanly softness, no change of pace, nothing but the petulant defiance of a depraved child,” culture critic Dwight Macdonald observed.

Their eccentric “Comic Strip” featured Ms. Bardot vocalizing sounds such as “pow” and “bam.” Their recordings “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Harley Davidson” played up her sultry appeal, but no song did so more notoriously than “Je t’aime … moi non plus” (“I love you … neither do I”), replete with risqué lyrics and moans to simulate lovemaking. At her husband’s urging, Ms. Bardot managed to block its release. Gainsbourg then remade the record with his new girlfriend, English actress Jane Birkin, and it soared to the top of European charts in the few countries where it was not banned.

Gainsbourg’s song “Initials B.B.” conveyed Ms. Bardot’s ravishing glamour: “All the way to her thighs, she is booted, and it’s like a chalice to her beauty; she wears nothing other than some essence of Guerlain in her hair.” (The piece was later used in a commercial for Guerlain, a French cosmetics and fragrance house.)

Ms. Bardot later confessed that she was miserable living up to the expectations of a full-time siren, quaffing champagne — up to two bottles a day — and being immortalized in song and by camera flashbulbs. A mercurial personality prone to tantrums and suicidal moods, she abandoned her only child, Nicolas — a son she had with her actor husband Jacques Charrier in 1960 — and later likened the boy’s existence to a “cancerous tumor.”

“I was not made to be a mother,” she said.

Animals ‘have never betrayed me’

After leaving show business, Ms. Bardot made a radical shift to animal rights activism. Animals, unlike men, “have never betrayed me,” she once said. “They are an easy prey, as I have been throughout my career. So we feel the same. I love them.” She sold off jewels to fund the animal welfare foundation that bears her name.