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Brigitte Bardot’s funeral was held on Wednesday with a private service and a public homage in Saint-Tropez, the French Riviera resort where she lived for more than half a century after retiring from movie stardom at the height of her fame.
The animal rights activist and far-right supporter died on Dec. 28 at the age of 91 at her home in southern France.
She died from cancer after undergoing two operations, her husband, Bernard d’Ormale, said in an interview with Paris Match magazine released Tuesday evening. “She was conscious and concerned about the fate of animals until the very end,” he said.
Residents and admirers applauded the funeral convoy as the coffin of Bardot, once one of the world’s most photographed women and a defining screen siren of the 1960s, was being carried through the town’s narrow streets.
The service began with a recording of Maria Callas singing Ave Maria at the Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption Catholic Church in the presence of Bardot’s husband, son and grandchildren, as well as guests invited by the family and the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals.
“Sadness is overwhelming, and pain, too,” Max Guazzini, a friend and secretary general of her foundation, said as he addressed mourners.
Hundreds of people gathered in the small town to follow the farewell on large screens set up at the port and on two plazas.
Bardot had long called Saint-Tropez her refuge from the celebrity that once made her a household name. She was buried “in the strictest privacy” at a cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.
The cemetery is also the final resting place of several cultural figures, including filmmaker Roger Vadim, Bardot’s first husband, who directed her breakout film And God Created Woman, a role that made her a worldwide star.
Bardot settled decades ago in her seaside villa, La Madrague, and retired from filmmaking in 1973 at the age of 39, during an international career that spanned more than two dozen films.
The French film star of the 1960s travels to Newfoundland in 1977 to witness the seal hunt in person.
Controversy later in life
While she withdrew from the film industry, she remained a highly visible and often controversial public figure through decades of animal rights activism and links with far-right politics.
Her opposition to the seal hunt in Newfoundland was criticized for discounting Indigenous ways of life, and she was convicted and fined five times in French courts of inciting racial hatred, in incidents inspired by her opposition to the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep during annual religious holidays.
“It’s true that sometimes I get carried away, but when I see how slowly things move forward … my distress takes over,” Bardot told The Associated Press when asked about her racial hatred convictions and opposition to Muslim ritual slaughter.
