SAINT-TROPEZ, France — Brigitte Bardot was laid to rest Thursday in her adopted hometown as crowds gathered for a Catholic funeral that underscored both the enduring glamour and the sharp divides of the French screen icon’s legacy. The Brigitte Bardot funeral drew hundreds to Saint-Tropez, where her husband disclosed she had died of cancer on Dec. 28 at age 91.
A wicker coffin was carried up the steps of the Notre-Dame de l’Assomption church and greeted by Bardot’s long-estranged son, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier. The service, attended by family, film-world figures, animal rights activists and far-right politicians, was broadcast on a large screen set up along the yacht-filled port that Bardot helped turn into an international symbol of Riviera chic.
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Bernard d’Ormale, Bardot’s fourth husband and a former far-right political adviser, told Paris Match on the eve of the funeral that Bardot had undergone two surgeries for an unspecified cancer before the disease “took her.” He said she was hospitalized twice late last year but insisted on returning to La Madrague, her sea-facing villa outside the town, where she died. “It was uncomfortable, even when she was bedridden,” he said, adding she stayed alert and “concerned about the fate of animals until the very end.”
Inside the church, mourners filed past a photograph of Bardot with one of her dogs. A well-known image of her cradling a baby seal — a hallmark of her decades of animal welfare campaigning — stood near the pulpit amid elaborate flower wreaths. D’Ormale sat in the front row beside Charrier, 65, who lives in Oslo and attended with his children and grandchildren. Bardot and her only child were estranged for much of their lives, but drew closer in her final years.
Marine Le Pen, a leader of France’s nationalist right, joined the congregation, as did representatives of the Bardot Foundation and figures connected to the French New Wave era Bardot helped define. The son of late screen legend Jean-Paul Belmondo was also present, linking the ceremony to a cinematic generation that reshaped global film culture in the 1950s and 60s.
Outside, onlookers lined the narrow streets as the midday sun lit the ochre facades of the old port. Hundreds watched the proceedings in silence on the waterfront screen, a quieter turnout than some had anticipated in a town whose modern mystique is inseparable from Bardot’s image in films such as “And God Created Woman.”
The modest scale of the commemoration, and the absence of a state ceremony, reflected Bardot’s complicated public standing. While widely celebrated as a screen icon and a symbol of the 1960s sexual revolution, she was also convicted five times for inciting racial hatred, particularly with remarks targeting Muslims. President Emmanuel Macron’s office offered to organize a national homage akin to the 2021 ceremony for Belmondo, but the family declined.
Bardot was buried at a seaside cemetery in Saint-Tropez alongside her parents and grandparents. In 2018, she had said she wished to be buried in the garden of La Madrague with her pets to avoid “a crowd of idiots” trampling the graves of her ancestors; family members opted for the town’s cemetery, a short walk from the waters that framed her life.
Born in 1934, Bardot was a ballet-trained model turned actress who became an international sensation, then retreated from the industry at the height of her fame. She later devoted herself to animal rights, while her outspoken politics and provocative writings fractured public opinion. In her memoirs, she wrote that she had once sought to end the pregnancy that led to the birth of her son, comparing it to carrying a “tumor that fed on me,” remarks that shocked France and marked her as a polarizing figure.
On Thursday, Saint-Tropez offered a farewell rooted in the place Bardot made famous: the bells of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption, the glinting bay, and a procession that mingled curiosity, admiration and unease — a final tableau for a star who changed cinema, courted controversy and never stopped stirring strong feelings.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
