Not since the Statue of Liberty has a French girl lit such fires in America,’ a Life magazine critic wrote of Brigitte Bardot in 1958. Two years earlier she’d starred in her estranged husband Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, which, despite the Hollywood censors’ cuts, became the highest-grossing foreign film ever released in the US. It also made paparazzi skirmishes, like the one pictured here, a daily occurrence.
The Parisian wasn’t a movie newbie, having already starred in several films and earned the nickname ‘sex kitten’. American theatre managers were arrested for showing her on-screen exploits, but the press outrage only enticed viewers. ‘There lies Brigitte,’ one critic grumbled, ‘stretched from end to end of the screen, bottoms up and bare as a censor’s eyeball,’ in a review meant to appeal to morality. The queues for tickets just grew longer.
The controversy did her career no harm. Bardot acted in more than 45 films before retiring in the early 1970s. Now 90, she lives quietly in Saint-Tropez but remains the best-known symbol of the sexual revolution. ‘Bardot is a locomotive of women’s history,’ Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1959, a French export ‘as important as Renault automobiles’.