French Actress Brigitte Bardot (1934-2025)

What can one say when the most beautiful woman in the world grows old and dies a divisive figure at the age of 91? When I was a young man, I thought that Brigitte Bardot could do no wrong. She was Venus de Milo personified. I saw her films And God Created Woman (1956) and Contempt (1963) multiple times.

But Brigitte was far from perfect. In her later years, she espoused rightist causes, campaigning for the LePens in French elections and reviling Muslims and even calling the residents of Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, “savages.”

Okay, she wasn’t perfect—except in the way she looked in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, she was a goddess. As a young film freak in Los Angeles, I worshiped the ground she walked on.

Then I heard she was a big animal rights activist. “That’s all right,” I thought. But then I started hearing uglier things. By then, Brigitte was a hermit of sorts living on the French Riviera.

There’s a lesson to be learned there. We are all human, we are all likely to err, we will all eventually lose our looks and die.