WHEN a British journalist asked a 22-year-old Brigitte Bardot if she felt comfortable in her sexy dress, she replied: “It is more important that men should feel uncomfortable.”
The movie legend’s open, unashamed enjoyment of men and lovemaking was revolutionary in the Fifties and she became an icon of sexuality.
A teenage John Lennon went to bed each night looking up at a life-size picture of the actress he had pasted on his ceiling.
And a young Bob Dylan wrote his first-ever piece of music in her honour: Song for Brigitte.
Meanwhile, actor Dirk Bogarde, who starred with the French beauty just before her superstardom, said that compared to her, British women seemed like “Brussels sprouts and porridge”.
The Vatican was so appalled by her influence that in 1958 it put her figure on display at an exhibition to represent Evil.
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But the power of the star, who has died aged 91, was unstoppable.
The look she invented in 1956, of wild, tumbling locks and unfussy clothes, consigned the reigning ideal of rigidly set hair and structured clothing to history.
Nearly seven decades on, her tousled blonde mane, pouting lips and heavy eye make-up remains an epitome of beauty, copied by everyone from Kate Moss to Britney Spears.
And her ground-breaking attitude to sexas she unapologetically worked her way through a long series of husbands and lovers, seems just as modern.
She declared: “It is not possible to have only one man.”
And she insisted: “I want there to be no hypocrisy, no nonsense about love.”
Such ideas saw her taken up as a symbol by feminists including Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote in 1959: “In the game of love she is as much the hunter as she is the prey.”
But Brigitte, who quit acting at the height of her fame to devote herself to animal rights, did not want to be a feminist symbol any more than she wanted to be a sex symbol.
She explained in 2015: “It’s a total misunderstanding! … I was simply the person I wanted to be: natural, genuine, and honest.”
But that, according to film director Louis Malle in 1994, was the point: “She set a model of independence as a sort of claim for a woman to live exactly the same life as a man.”
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born in Paris on September 28, 1934, into a well-heeled family.
Her father Louis ran an industrial firm and her mother was devoted to ballet, which Bardot studied from a young age.
Then in 1948, a hat-maker friend of her mother’s used the youngster to model his designs.
Soon the then-brunette was doing magazine shoots and appeared on the cover of Elle for the first time in May 1949, aged 14.
Fashion historian Nicole Parrot later recalled: “Women of my generation all remember her first cover. She represented something that had never had its place before in society or in fashion: that of the jeune fille.”
Another cover two years later caught the eye of a filmmaker who sent young assistant Roger Vadim to her family’s apartment to encourage her to come to an audition.
Vadim, 22, walked out on to the terrace with the 16 year old who announced: “I love balconies.”
When he asked why, she replied: “Do you have to have a reason for loving?”
He was smitten.
They soon became lovers and married when Bardot turned 18 in 1952.
Vadim quickly steered her into films and would go on to write and direct the sex-charged movie that made her a global sensation, 1956’s And God Created Woman.
But he always insisted: “I did not invent Brigitte Bardot. I simply helped her to blossom.”
Britain was the first country outside France to go bananas over the starlet, when she was cast alongside Dirk Bogarde in 1955’s Doctor at Sea.
Newspapers hailed her “the sauciest mam’selle in France”, and she won reporters’ hearts with her endearing use of English – for example, saying her dog was a “Cocker Spaniard”.
At the time, her nickname was “the Gorgeous Pekingese” after another canine breed (“It is my nose, you see”). But Brits soon came up with a better animal comparison.
It was a photographer taking shots for Doctor at Sea who invented the term that would define her: “sex kitten”.
By October 1956, she was so famous here that she was invited over to meet the Queen at a Royal Film Performance – in a line-up that also included Marilyn Monroe.
By then she had also met another heavyweight: in June that year, Sir Winston Churchill dropped by studios in Nice where she was filming And God Created Woman.
The 22-year-old told the ex-PM: “You seem rather cute.”
A witness later recalled that the great orator was left “speechless”.
Bardot was entirely in charge of her own look for this film, and bleached her brown hair blonde.
She later said: “It was the first film where I was really myself. Before that, I was systematically tizzied up, beehived, corseted and bullied.”
Her character Juliette is first glimpsed sunbathing naked, and for the rest of the film, she treats sex as a simple pleasure to be enjoyed as much as the sunshine.
Unlike sex-pots of previous films, she was not a femme fatale or a schemer.
Meanwhile, an excited reviewer in Britain called the film’s sex scenes “the most wanton and abandoned ever filmed”.
Even today, her erotic charisma in the movie sizzles, especially in the famous scene where she does a solo mambo that is pure animal energy.
As for Bardot, she said of the role: “I was not acting. I was just living.”
The film was a phenomenon, reportedly bringing in more money for France than its previous biggest export, the Renault.
It changed Bardot’s life instantly.
She later recalled: “I was followed, spied upon, adored, insulted. My private life became public.”
And that private life kept the world agog: during filming she fell for co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant and left Roger Vadim.
She explained: “I don’t like to be married a long time. I like to have liberty.”
In 1959, she married another actor, Jacques Charrier, but only because she was pregnant and, as she was constantly trailed by the Press, felt she could not get an abortion.
She called pregnancy a “cancerous tumour”.
Only child Nicolas was born in January 1960, and eight months later, on her 26th birthday, Bardot tried to take her own life with an overdose of pills.
She and Charrier divorced in 1962 and Nicolas was raised almost entirely by his father.
Mother and son only reconciled in 2014 after she became a great-grandmother.
Bardot married twice more: to documentary maker Gunter Sachs from 1966 to 1969, then to right-wing political advisor Bernard d’Ormale from 1992 until her death.
She also had high-profile affairs with men including Hollywood star Warren Beatty and French music legend Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she recorded the original version of his heavy-breathing love song Je T’Aime.
It was so steamy that her husband at the time refused to let her release it, so Gainsbourg re-recorded it with British actress Jane Birkin.
Birkin went on to feature with Bardot in a notorious lesbian love scene in the 1973 movie If Don Juan Were A Woman.
And Birkin seized the opportunity to take a close look at the world’s most famous body, recalling later: “Everything is absolutely perfect: the ankles are tiny, the waist is tiny, the bosoms are divine.”
Don Juan was typical of Bardot’s later movies – fluff designed around her status as a sex symbol.
While she appeared in some classics, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, her image transcended her work to the point the career became irrelevant.
She was the most famous Frenchwoman since Joan of Arc and in 1969 she even posed for the sculpted likeness of Marianne, the personification of the French Republic.
At the end of 1973, aged 39, Bardot announced she was retiring from movies to dedicate her life to animals.
She later said: “This worship of celebrity suffocated me. Humans have hurt me, deeply. And it is only with animals, with nature, that I found peace.”
Bardot’s early campaigns drew attention to the killing of baby seals in Canada, and she later helped ban the import of ivory.
But her opposition to halal methods of slaughter led to anti-Muslim jibes, and she was fined five times for inciting racial hatred.
Until her death, she lived at the house she had bought in 1958 near Saint-Tropez, the fishing port that became one of the world’s most fashionable resorts after And God Created Woman was set there.
She kept dozens of horses, donkeys, goats and pigs, all saved from abattoirs, as well as hens, geese, ducks and 20 cats.
And she kept her famous flowing hair and her distinctive make-up despite her age – until the end, pushing the boundaries of accepted sexuality.
In her later years she declared: “My life is now what I always wanted.”
And she added: “I’ve always done as I pleased, that’s all. And I know I have more balls than a lot of men.”