Brigitte Bardot, the French screen legend who walked away from the film industry to support animal rights and lead opposition to open borders and mass immigration, has died. She was 91.
The Guardian reports Paris-born Bardot shot to international fame with the 1956 film And God Created Woman, written and directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim.
For the next two decades she embodied the idea of the archetypal “sex kitten.”
Her work on screen was not to last. The Guardian notes in the early 70s she announced her retirement from acting and became increasingly active politically.
Bardot’s outspoken support of animal rights evolved into comments about ethnic minorities and open support for France’s Front National, resulting in a string of convictions for racial hatred.
Acknowledged as a symbol of woman’s liberation, Bardot told Le Figaro in 20915 she was against the Muslim face veil.
“Communitarianism takes on too much importance. It is the culmination of thirty years of laxity.”
A committed free speech activist, the actress faced trial five times between 1997 and 2008 for “inciting racial hatred” including for comments criticising mass Muslim immigration in France.
On one of these occasions, she was convicted for “decrying the loss of French identity and tradition due to the ‘multiplication of mosques while our church bells fall silent for want of priests’.”
She always maintained she simply respected the French way of life and sought to protect it and its inheritors.
Bardot was also a vocal opponent of Muslim halal slaughter, which often involves slaughtering an animal without stunning it, causing pain and distress before death.
Bruno Jacquelin, of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals, told the Associated Press she died at her home in southern France, and would not provide a cause of death. He said no arrangements have yet been made for funeral or memorial services.
Bardot had been hospitalized last month.