Brigitte Bardot (famously known as B.B.) was born born on September 28, 1934 in Paris to a bourgeois French family, her father being a successful industrialist. At the age of 13 she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet, before deciding to get work as a model.
In May 1949, Bardot appeared on the cover of Elle magazine, and was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. (Later, Vadim would become Bardot's first husband, although the marriage would only last five years.)
Bardot's film career began with Jean Boyer's 1952 film Le Trou normand. A string of similar small parts followed but it wasn’t until she appeared in Vadim’s 1956 film Et Dieu... créa la femme that she achieved celebrity. The film was a sensation, on both sides of the Atlantic, and earned Bardot an instant international reputation as a sex goddess.
Film directors were quick to capitalize on Bardot’s money-spinning potential. Although she appeared in a few American films, her preference was for French cinema. The actress starred in a number of high profile films, including Autant-Lara’s En Cas de malheur, Clouzot’s La Verité and Louis Malle’s Vie privée. She also starred in Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark 1963 film Le mépris, although this film was far less successful at the box office. During this period, she began recording songs.
Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After a series of flops, and tired of the pressures of being an actress (which pushed her to the brink of suicide on a few occasions), she decided to retire from film making. After her last film in 1975, B.B. announced that she would dedicate the rest of her career to her main passion in life: animal rights.
In 1976, the former actress set up the Birigitte Bardot Foundation for Distressed Animals, an organization for which she has worked actively ever since. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1984.
