In 1958, an article in the LA Mirror asked: “Should we ban Brigitte Bardot?”

“Every time I pick up a newspaper or go by a theatre marquee there she is, blasted all over the place with her stringy, unkempt hair, her plunging necklines, her bare feet, her vapid eyes and her half-opened mouth,” complained columnist Dick Williams. “Her casual attitude towards marriage is both shocking and immoral.”

The pearl-clutching journalist wasn’t alone in being outraged by Brigitte Bardot. The Parisian actor, model and animal rights activist, who has died at the age of 91, lived a life that was never far from scandal.

She became an international star with the release of 1956’s And God Created Woman, in which she played a scantily clad teenage orphan with a free-spirited attitude to sex. The film made $4m in the United States, a record at the time for a foreign film. It was helped rather than hindered by the uproar over Bardot’s performance and appearance. The film was banned in several states, while a district attorney in Philadelphia declared it to be of a “lascivious, sacrilegious, obscene, indecent, or immoral nature”. No wonder audiences couldn’t get enough.

The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote an essay in 1959 titled “The Lolita Syndrome” about Bardot’s youthful appeal, observing that “a saint would sell his soul to the devil merely to watch her dance.” Bardot’s early film roles were credited with igniting the sexual revolution on both sides of the Atlantic, and the phrase “sex kitten” was coined specifically to describe her. She refused to work in Hollywood, turning down several sizeable financial offers, and quit acting entirely before she turned 40.

Continue reading at The Independent