CARNAL NATION

Today marks the seventy-fifth birthday of legendary sex symbol Brigitte Bardot. An international phenomenon and symbol of sexual liberation from the fifties through the seventies, the French icon has spent much of the last thirty-five years living in seclusion in Saint Tropez, working for animal rights and getting into trouble with the law.

A beauty from a young age, Bardot made the cover of Elle when she was just fifteen.  At eighteen, she married Roger Vadim, the film director who would later cast her as Juliette Hardy in the light-hearted but campy drama Et Dieu... créa la femme (And God Created Woman). It wasn't Bardot's first role, but it was the one that catapulted her to superstardom.  The sexy film was a hit internationally, including in the US, despite it's risque subject matter.

Over the next seventeen years Ms. Bardot starred in a wide range of films, many of them very terrible, though there was the odd classic like Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. Most of her films are forgotten these days, despite oddball appearances in a western with Sean Connery (Shalako) and a spy comedy called Agent 36-24-36, alongside Psycho star Anthony Perkins. Bardot's final role was in 1973's L'histoire très bonne et très joyeuse de Colinot Trousse-Chemise, a historical farce set in fifteenth-century France.  "I have made forty-eight films of which only five were good," Bardot said at the time of her retirement.

In the sixties Bardot also had a successful music career, recording a number of songs with musician/provocateur Serge Gainsbourg, including "Comic Strip", "Bonnie and Clyde", and the original version of smutty classic "Je T'Aime...Moi Non Plus". (Bardot's version of the song was never released, per her request, and remained unheard for nearly twenty years. Gainsbourg re-recorded the song in 1969 with Jane Birkin, and it became his biggest hit and only commercial success outside France.)

Birkin retired from the limelight just before she turned forty, and since then has devoted her life to animal rights.  She launched the charitable Brigitte Bardot Foundation with funds largely raised from selling her jewelry.  Her fourth husband, Bernard d'Ormale, is a businessman and politician with ties to the far-right Front Nationale, and Bardot has been arrested and fined on five separate occasions for inciting racial hatred.  On numerous occasions she has made disparaging remarks about Muslims in France, particularly with regard to the religious holiday of Eid.  Sheep are ceremonially killed on the holiday, which the animal rights activist believes to be inhumane.

An exhibition in the star's honor, Brigitte Bardot: The Carefree Years, will open this week in Paris.