Brigitte Bardot Dead
Was Noticed By A Hollywood News Writer In 1952 Before Worldwide Fame
Brigitte Bardot in Madrid, Spain, 1957 photographer: Peter Basch
Brigitte Bardot, who quit film acting at age 39 in 1973 to devote herself to animal rights is dead.
The Fondation Brigitte Bardot who announced her death did not reveal a cause, place or date that she died.
Her obituary appears worldwide, so we will not cover the details of her long and sometimes controversial life or film career.
What interested us is: when did Bardot first come to notice in the United States?
The February 21, 1951 issue of the showbiz bible Variety mentions that the 16-year-old Bardot had been signed by French director Marc Allegret to appear in his new picture Lauriers Sont Coupes on the strength of her photo in a magazine. The picture was never made. Marc Allegret did eventually cast Bardot in School For Love (1955).
But the first U.S. news feature on Bardot was by Louis Berg the movie editor for This Week, the magazine supplement to many newspapers. The article appeared October 26, 1952.
This Week October 26 1952 Bardot feature
The This Week article reads:
The French movie industry, which lost Leslie Caron to Hollywood, thinks it has a perfect replacement in 17-year-old Brigitte Bardot, who, like Caron, is both ballet dancer and movie star.
Brigitte is saucier than her counterpart, livelier, and equipped with an even more amazing set of legs. When she is not being a movie star, she has a tendency to act even younger than her age. She shares a playroom in the country with a stuffed bear, some Picasso prints, a phonograph and a pet turtle named “Oscar.”
She lives with her parents; her father is a French industrialist and well-to-do. Living with the family also is a grandfather, whom Brigitte still calls “Boum Papa,” her name for him from infancy, and who permits her to pull his beard as a form of endearment. Brigitte was a model at 12, a professional dancer at 14. Her first movie, “Le Trou Normand,” has yet to be shown in this country. When it is, the French critics predict, Hollywood offers will follow.
The word iconic is used far too often to describe stardom, but Bardot was an iconic star. In the 1960s Bardot’s presence in life and film changed the way women dressed and looked, Bardot was the idealized fantasy sex object for millions of men. Even when beginning her career the Associated Press was calling her “sultry and sexy” at the age of 18.
Her acting ability was rarely on display as the roles she received did little to showcase them. It was her talent as a dancer and her looks that initially got her noticed. In 1956 at the age of 21 she starred in And God Created Woman,and became an international star.
If you want to see Bardot in a film that shows her charm as an actress we strongly recommend the one that bears her name in the title but not in the credits, Dear Brigitte (1965). It stars Billy Mumy (the child actor from Lost in Space) as a math prodigy. James Stewart plays Mumy’s father who finds that his son has been writing love letters to Bardot. She answers the letters by inviting Mumy to visit her if he is ever in France. Bardot agreed to do the film as long as she went uncredited and was not in any promotional materials.
