Brigitte Bardot Speaks Out Agains Me Too
She is 77 years old and dresses always in black—blackness blouse and blackness jeans, never a skirt, never a dress. She wears her hair in a large bun, like a crown, and styles the hair herself. She applies her own makeup. Considering she suffers from arthritis and other ailments, she sometimes uses a cane; an operation would aid, but she fears the anesthesia. She lives at La Madrague, a secluded property in St. Tropez, which she has owned for more than 50 years, and she guards her privacy zealously and devotes her energies to animal rights. When I visited her there recently, she sipped champagne in the salon and fabricated an offhand reference to her "faded beauty." The sentiment was sincere, though the reality was frankly unconvincing. Much more persuasive was what she said about her life and her career: "If I upset some notions and went confronting established rules, that wasn't role of what I wanted to do. Information technology wasn't my goal."
Brigitte Bardot bought La Madrague in 1958. She had left the set of The Woman and the Puppet and come up down for the weekend on the Bluish Train; the only notary in St. Tropez opened his office on a Sunday in social club to shut the deal. The property, shrouded in bamboo and lavander and pine, had been owned by an erstwhile woman, and the principal building was unprepossessing—function boathouse, function fisherman'southward shack. Bardot brought in h2o, gas, electricity, and her fiancé of the moment. In those early days there would be costume parties and gypsy dances in the sand. Just the real appeal of the setting was something more enduring. La Madrague (the name refers to the traps in one case set out by local fishermen) lay on a dirt road at 1 end of the Bay of Canoubiers, well off the beaten track—it was all but certain to remain a sanctuary, far from the crowds that would soon engulf the South of French republic.
Today, Bardot lives at La Madrague with her married man of xx years, Bernard d'Ormale, a one-time businessman who now mainly devotes himself to his wife. Visitors are rare: the lady of the business firm is non eager for guests. La Madrague is a peaceable enclave, perfumed past wild herbs and flowers. Decades agone, the walls kept throngs of fans and photographers at bay. It is quieter now. On the outside of the surrounding wall is a small trough for dogs, the basin continually freshened with h2o. The house itself lies across the dark-blue gate, overlooking the bounding main, its walls covered with clematis and wisteria. Inside, the furnishings are bohemian and eclectic, very casual and somehow frozen in time. A dozen dogs and cats roam the belongings. In the garden, under wooden crosses, lie cats and dogs who have departed.
Bardot had known this area for many years: her parents owned a vacation house in St. Tropez, and she spent summers here with her younger sister. Born into a family unit of ways, Bardot began taking dance classes at the age of 7 with the aim of becoming a ballerina. After x years en pointe she caused an effortless attraction. Bardot'due south modeling career began when she started posing for friends of her female parent, who designed hats. Photographs were taken—and noticed. In 1950, at the age of fifteen, she graced the encompass of French Elle, which led, in 1952, to her marriage to the director Roger Vadim and the first of 40 movies. The movies initially were lighthearted romantic comedies, the plots interchangeable and forgettable. "I don't think I was a adept comedian," Bardot says. "I contented myself to limited what people asked me to interpret, and giving it my all-time." But the story lines were hardly the point. On the screen the world discovered a young woman with a swan's neck, a luscious figure, and an ostentatious bouffant who combined youth, sex, flirtatiousness, insolence, and grace, all wrapped up in a bewildering nonchalance—a heady mix. She was a new kind of blonde bombshell, a phenomenon that a world still recovering from the nightmare of war didn't quite know it was waiting for.
Then, in 1956, Vadim offered her the astonishing role of the tearing and savage Juliette in … And God Created Woman. The movie was poorly received in French republic—its sensational depiction of a small-boondocks siren and her outcome on the men around her rubbed a conservative culture the incorrect style—but it triumphed in the U.S. Later on four years and 15 roles, Bardot had reached the meridian in a serious film. "In fact, I owe everything to the Americans," she explains. Ironically, she never made a picture in the United states, and she starred aslope very few American actors (Kirk Douglas existence ane of them). The success of … And God Created Woman did not bring Bardot the sort of personal satisfaction one might have anticipated. "All my life," she says, "during that pic, and before and later, I was never what I wanted to exist, which was frank, honest, and straightforward. I wasn't scandalous—I didn't want to be. I wanted to be myself. Only myself."
In 1973, Bardot decided to bring her acting career to an finish and brainstorm a 2nd life. Her screen image would henceforward be preserved in bister at a certain historic period, every bit it had been for Garbo and Monroe. "I was really sick of it," Bardot says. "Good thing I stopped, because what happened to Marilyn Monroe and Romy Schneider would take happened to me." Over the years she had turned down roles opposite Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen (Faye Dunaway took the part in The Thomas Crown Affair), and Marlon Brando (leaving a meg-dollar paycheck on the tabular array). When she was on location, making movies, she had often found herself picking upwardly devious animals, even goats and sheep, destined for the pound or the slaughterhouse, and going as far as to shelter them in her hotel room. Perchance information technology should not have been a surprise that she decided to dedicate herself to animal rights, and to the idea that animals deserve respect equally living beings and are non just a source of turn a profit.
"Information technology's what I dreamed of," Bardot says now. "It's what I always wanted." She threw herself seriously into the animal-rights campaign showtime in 1977, with her efforts to end the killing of baby seals in Canada. She has stepped in to oppose the send and slaughter of horses, vivisection, bullfights, industrial beast farms, hunting, the wearing of fur. To back up the crusade, Bardot sold many of her personal effects at auction—her dresses, her souvenirs, and even some of her jewelry, including a diamond band, carmine bracelets, and a pearl necklace given to her by the German millionaire Gunter Sachs, her tertiary hubby. ("I never go hung up on the past—the memories are likewise negative.") Bardot's work is embodied in the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals, based in Paris. She does not utilise a computer but is in constant advice with the foundation the old-fashioned way, writing in blueish ink on blueish sheets of paper that comport only the words "La Madrague, Saint-Tropez, 83990." She works by a window at a rustic Provence table with a checked tablecloth. To her signature she adds a little daisy. "I don't feel old or used upwards," she says, "and I don't have time to waste thinking well-nigh aging, because I live only for my cause. Today, there are more than regulations on cars than for animals."
From her home, she distributes good and bad marks to politicians effectually the world. Bardot is passionate and outspoken, and she has fabricated controversial remarks on subjects such as immigration (a sensitive issue in France), and found herself in courtroom as a event. But she is not a political person. "I am non playing political games," she says. "I don't care. I don't bother with that. I vest to no political party and I am militant for no one. All of my causes, including the most radical, are motivated by the defense of animals." During the past few weeks, she has written to Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace, whose Sea Shepherd Conservation Society combats Japanese whale-hunters from a fleet of ships. (1 of the boats carries Bardot'south name.) She has written to the French minister of strange affairs, asking him to proceed pressure on Nihon, and to the French government minister of agronomics, to call attending to the horrors of the slaughterhouses. She has even written to Vladimir Putin (Bardot is his favorite actress) to thank him for taking steps to protect wolves and for enacting a ban on the sealskin trade. She anticipates and dismisses a raised eyebrow at the overture to Putin: "I don't intendance nearly looking conservative and awkward. I'm merely looking to assuage my soul and protect the animals."
Bardot doesn't leave La Madrague except to spend time at some other house, La Garrigue, in the hills a few miles abroad, where she maintains a small chapel, and keeps horses, donkeys, cows, and pigs. She has not set foot in the port of St. Tropez itself for more than than 10 years; Jean-Michel, a stylist in that location, comes out occasionally to cutting her pilus. "I'yard attached to the St. Tropez that I once knew," Bardot says. "The old St. Tropez." She is secluded but hardly a recluse: "I don't refuse the world but its promiscuity." She reads Le Figaro every morning and does the crossword puzzle. She listens only to Radio Classique. Ask well-nigh the writers she likes, and she will mention Milan Kundera, Bernard Clavel, and Konrad Lorenz. She is flattered by the exhibition of photographs that will open up in Los Angeles in February and travel to Sofitel hotels around the country, merely she will not exist in omnipresence. Emphatically, Bardot does not live a Sunset Boulevard kind of life, trapped in her own legend. You will not discover her engrossed in her sometime movies. As she herself sees it, she is in the prime of life. "The other day," she said, "I came across … And God Created Woman on TV, which I haven't seen in ages. I told myself that that daughter wasn't bad. Just it was like it was someone other than me. I have improve things to exercise than study myself on a screen."
The Temptress of St. Tropez
On the set of A Very Private Affair.
Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2012/03/bardot-201203