Brigitte Bardot, hailed as the French Marilyn Monroe, was the first major film star to channel her glamour and fame into supporting France’s far right, who she backed for more than 30 years.
Up until her death on Sunday, Bardot had expressed her contentment at Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration National Rally party’s rising share of the vote before the 2027 presidential race.
The film star, who quit cinema to become an animal rights activist, always said she only wanted to be remembered for the animal rights struggle – which she called her sole cause.
But for years, her public comments on immigration and the future of France were divisive. With polls showing Le Pen’s party is likely to make the final round of the 2027 presidential race and is as close as it has ever come to taking power, Bardot’s politics will be remembered as a significant part of her legacy.
Her image is complicated by the fact she was convicted five times for inciting racial hatred over remarks – most of them about Muslims and what she called an “invasion” of foreigners in France, but also about people on the French island of Réunion, whom she described as “savages”.
In her final book, Mon BBcédaire (My BB Alphabet), published weeks before her death, Bardot said the right – which was how she termed Le Pen’s party – was the “only urgent remedy to the agony of France”, a country she said had become “dull, sad, submissive, ill, ruined, ravaged, ordinary and vulgar”.
For more than 30 years from the 1990s onwards, Bardot supported Jean-Marie Le Pen’s anti-immigration Front National, then backed his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who renamed the party National Rally (RN).
In the 1990s, amid the rising presence of the far right on the French Riviera, where Bardot lived, she met her husband, Bernard d’Ormale, through the Le Pen family at a dinner organised in Saint-Tropez. In 1993, Bardot married d’Ormale, a former adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, who remained her husband until her death.
Bardot supported Marine Le Pen, saying “she is the only woman … who has balls”. She backed her presidential bids of 2012 and 2017, particularly praising Le Pen’s criticisms of the presence of halal meat in France.
Le Pen in turn cited Bardot – whose image had been used as a model for Marianne, the female symbol of the French republic – as the ultimate symbol of Frenchness.
In 2016, amid a political row over banning full-body swimsuits, or burkinis, on French beaches, Le Pen said French beaches were instead the home of Bardot, known for posing in a bikini on the beach at Cannes.
Last year after Emmanuel Macron called a snap election in which the far right increased its presence in parliament, Bardot said that Jordan Bardella, the RN’s young president, was “very good”. Bardella paid tribute to Bardot after her death as an “ardent patriot”.
Bardot harnessed her political energies into the animal rights cause, meeting most French presidents from Charles de Gaulle to Macron at the Élysée and petitioning them over issues such as the importation of baby seal fur, elephant poaching and hunting.
While saying she was resolutely of the right, Bardot also argued she could work with any politician who would help stand up for animal rights, once praising the left’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon for his vegetarianism.
In 2013, Bardot threatened to leave France and apply for Russian citizenship if two elephants in Lyon zoo, suffering from tuberculosis, were euthanised. But after praising Russia’s Vladimir Putin, she changed tack and criticised him after the invasion of Ukraine.
In her final years, Bardot was critical of the #MeToo movement. Before a verdict was delivered earlier this year against the actor Gérard Depardieu, who was found guilty of sexually assaulting two women during a film shoot in 2021, Bardot defended what she called “talented people who grab a girl’s bottom”.
“Feminism isn’t my thing … I like men,” she told BFM TV in her final TV interview this year. When the interviewer suggested it was possible both to be a feminist and like men, Bardot shouted: “No!”
