I had been meaning to say something about the iconographic Brigitte Bardot who has died aged 91 and whose funeral was this week and for quite some time before I wanted to out down what I had thought about her but never really got around to it as she meant nothing to me and now she has passed it doesn’t sit well to speak ill of the dead. But to paraphrase Bette Davis in the death of Joan Crawford “one should not speak ill of the dead only good. Crawford is dead!
Good!”
Racist, ant-feminist, anti- trans and still married at the time of her death to Jean Marie Le Pen’ Machiavellian spin doctor and darling of the fascist right Bernard d’Ormale.
Suffice to say I just didn’t ‘get’ her! Not sure the British ever did. She seemed like some exotic creature from another planet as indeed France might just as well have been. She always seemed inherently ‘other'
Ever a big fish in a small pond choosing to say in France, resolutely speaking only French [as per so many clichéd French people still do especially Parisians], and she seemed to have little to no redeeming features or characteristics that I could relate to. Her first film came out before I was born and she never really seemed to fit well with my generation. I agree with her about her acting (sic). She couldn’t and was uniformly awful at it and gave it up by the age of 39 (retiring in 1973! )where she adopted the French recluse mad cat lady schtick whilst allegedly being almost solely responsible for putting the sleepy St Tropez on the tourist map!). No Jeane Moreau or Catherine Deneuve she
At 16 (1950) she made the cover of Elle magazine and several times afterward. Serially promiscuous from the age of 15 when she seems to have been groomed by film director Roger Vadim (she claimed lovers in the hundreds!) her parents did indeed step in and told the couple they had to wait until she was 18 (sic), married three times in her twenties, it seems she was abused early on (horsewhipping a parenting technique from her mother!) but made much of her sexuality as being some kind of stand against the world and from this hugely dysfunctional family background she had seemingly no maternal instinct whatsoever and indeed seems to have become a largely wholly dysfunctional adult preferring animals to people which has always been a bad sign in terms of social adjustment and psychological personal development. She never appeared to know how many animals she actually owned! Not just domesticated farm rescues but had no idea how many pet cats or dogs she actually housed!
Ultimately extremely right wing (friend to the Le Pen family!) and increasingly intolerant of race, immigration and homosexuality she seemed to have always been out of step with the zeitgeist no matter what the image may have implied. At once only mere surface image and little to no substance politically, ideologically or indeed intellectually
Anti-feminist (anti-me-too movement “hypocrites”, deeply racist (five convictions for incitement to racial hatred), the LGBTQ community anathema to her raging incontinent heterosexuality where her sole ‘gift’ seems to have been a desire to divest herself of her garments at any and every given opportunity, sued by her son and his father (on the publication of her autobiography where she said she would have ‘rather have given birth to a puppy’ - likening the foetus to a cancerous tumour - sic), and after affairs with hundreds by her own calculations, her fourth and final marriage in 1992 was to Bernard d’Ormale, an adviser to National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. They were married at the time of her death.
A Gallic anachronistic joke and cliché, I doubt she will be much missed, the image maybe but little more of any substance
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