Bye Bye, BéBé
Scenes from Brigitte Bardot's funeral in her beloved Saint-Tropez today. Plus, my interview/profile of her from 1994.
Brigitte Bardot bathed in the bright Mediterranean sunlight one last time today as a white Mercedes hearse ferried her through the narrow streets of Saint-Tropez to Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption church for a private funeral attended by family and several French luminaries, including far-right political leader Marine Le Pen, who Bardot once called “the Joan of Arc of the 21st century.”
As the police-escorted cortege drove along the port in the frigid morning air, hundreds of fans and locals, many of them with their dogs, applauded. Bardot, who died on Dec. 28 from cancer at 91, shot to stardom in French director Roger Vadim’s 1956 erotic drama, Et Dieu créa la femme [And God Created Woman], set in Saint-Tropez. (If you don’t known the movie, you can rent it here and here.) In the early 1970s, she quit show business to become a leading animal rights activist.
