Why Bardot Is Back in Style

Brigitte Bardot's pouty, carefree sexuality is back, and just in time for her 75th birthday next month. With fashion designers aping her look and London girls imitating her outfit in And God Created Woman—cropped jeans, pumps, and striped top—John Walsh looks back in the Independent at the sex kitten's career, from "the countess of come-hither" to the queen of racial intolerance in France.

Bardot's early flashes of on-screen nudity typecast her as "the chronic horizontale, the bed-hopping chanteuse" for life—or at least until she boldly quit the movies in 1973. She turned to animal rights causes, but has recently gone to court for inciting hatred against Muslim immigrants in France. "It's sad to think," writes Walsh, that a French symbol of sexual freedom "has come to despise modern France and to symbolise race hatred and bigoted suspicion." (More Brigitte Bardot stories.)