Iconic French actress Brigitte Bardot has been hospitalised, according to the country’s media outlets.
The film star, 91, is said to have been there for three weeks with a ‘serious illness’ although no further clarification has been made.
Brigitte was staying at her home in Saint-Tropez when she was admitted to a hospital in Toulon.
It has been claimed that she underwent surgery and is currently recovering and doctors will continue to monitor her condition.
Daily Mail have contacted Brigitte’s representatives for comment.
In July 2023, it was reported Brigitte had suffered respiratory problems amid soaring temperatures in Saint-Tropez that summer. She was attended to by medics at her home in the south of France, after she experienced some breathing difficulties.
Brigitte Bardot, 91, has been admitted to hospital in Saint-Tropez with a serious illness and has undergone surgery (pictured in 2007)
The film star, 91, is said to have been there for three weeks with a ‘serious illness’ although no further clarification has been made (pictured in a 1969 movie Les Femmes )
Bernard d’Ormale, the actress’s husband, told Var-Matin at the time: ‘It was around 9am when Brigitte had trouble breathing’ and described the health scare as a ‘respiratory distraction’.
He said: ‘[Her breathing] was stronger than usual but she did not lose consciousness. Let’s call it a moment of respiratory distraction.’
Brigitte was given oxygen by the medics and they ‘stayed to watch her’ for some time, before they left the actress’s home.
Bernard shared: ‘Like all people of a certain age, she can no longer bear the heat. It happens at 88 years old. She must not make useless efforts.’
The actress made her breakthrough in 1952 in the film The Girl In The Bikini and became one of the most famous French postwar film stars.
In 1956, Brigitte starred alongside her estranged husband Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, which, despite the Hollywood censors’ cuts, became the highest-grossing foreign film ever released in the US.
The Parisian wasn’t a movie newbie, having already starred in several films and earned the nickname ‘sex kitten’.
American theatre managers were arrested for showing her on-screen exploits, but the press outrage only enticed viewers. In 1957, priests in New York told people not to view Bardot’s films. The Vatican, which six years later accused Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of ‘erotic vagrancy’, condemned Bardot as ‘evil’.
The actress made her breakthrough in 1952 in the film The Girl In The Bikini and became one of the most famous French postwar film stars (pictured 1969)
She welcomed a son, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, with her second husband in 1960 (pictured) but was not maternal – calling her unborn baby a ‘cancerous tumour’.
‘There lies Brigitte,’ one critic grumbled, ‘stretched from end to end of the screen, bottoms up and bare as a censor’s eyeball,’ in a review meant to appeal to morality. The queues for tickets just grew longer.
The controversy did her career no harm. Bardot acted in more than 45 films and recorded more than 70 songs before retiring in the early 1970s.
John Lennon was famously a huge fan of the French star with her poster on his childhood bedroom wall, the two briefly met in 1968.
Born on September 28, 1934, in Paris, she initially trained as a ballet dancer at the National Superior Conservatory of Paris for Music and Dance.
At 15, Brigette had already appeared on the front cover of France’s Elle magazine and began to establish herself as a model.
Her acting career began in 1952 when she starred in a series of obscure roles, but she soon began to turn heads at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953 when she frolicked on the beach in a skimpy bikini.
She said: ‘Yes, I knew I was ugly as a child. I said to myself: ‘Well, I am ugly, so I must at least be bright and funny and have other things to compensate.’
‘I knew I had to be the best at something, otherwise I would be nothing. I knew I wanted the world to know about Brigitte Bardot.’
Never one for tradition, she posed for a nude spread in Playboy to celebrate her 40th birthday.
She created the Bardot pose, where she sat with her legs crossed in just a pair of black stockings, and the Bardot neckline was named after her because she made the style famous.
Brigitte has been married four times to Roger Vadim (1952-57), Jacques Charrier (1959-62), Gunter Sachs (1966-69) and Bernard d’Ormale, who she married in 1992.
She welcomed a son, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, with her second husband in 1960, but was not maternal – calling her unborn baby a ‘cancerous tumour’.
The actress-turned-animal rights activist has been married to far-right political aide Bernard d’Ormale since 1992 (pictured together in 1994)
A co-star who failed to find favour, even briefly, with Bardot was Sean Connery. ‘I never succumbed to his charm,’ she said. Or, possibly, it was his toupee’ (pictured 1968)
She would have preferred an abortion but the prospect was too scandalous, let alone illegal. ‘I want there to be no hypocrisy, no nonsense about love,’ she said harshly, and confessed that immediately after giving birth: ‘I started screaming, begging them to take him away from me. I never wanted to see him again.’
Nicolas was raised by Charrier’s family. Growing up, he led a life that Bardot had no idea about. In 1984, when he married a Norwegian supermodel, his mother wasn’t invited to the wedding.
They had no contact until 1996 when he took her to court for violation of privacy over what she had written about him in a book. She was ordered to pay him damages. Since then, mother and son have reconciled.
Speaking about motherhood she said: ‘I’m not made to be a mother. I don’t know why I think this because I adore animals and I adore children, but I’m not adult enough – I know it’s horrible to have to admit that, but I’m not adult enough to take care of a child.
Many lovers came and went – including singer-songwriter Sacha Distel and actor Warren Beatty.
‘I have always looked for passion,’ she explained. ‘That’s why I was often unfaithful. When the passion was coming to an end, I was packing my suitcase.’
Serge Gainsbourg wrote the sexually explicit song Je T’aime Moi Non Plus (I Love You – Me Not Anymore) after his fling with the actress.
A co-star who failed to find favour, even briefly, with Bardot was Sean Connery. ‘I never succumbed to his charm,’ she said. Or, possibly, it was his toupee.
Quitting acting in 1973, took her life in a different direction and she set up the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in 1986, she was a dedicated vegetarian and regularly campaigned for the rights of animals.
In 2013 she threatened to request Russian citizenship and leave France after a pair of 42-year-old elephants were refused treatment for TB in a Lyon zoo.
She referred to France as a ‘graveyard for animals’ but ultimately won the case and saved the two former circus animals.
In 2001 she also donated £96,671 over two years to sterilise and adopt 300,000 of Bucharest’s stray dogs.
Not all of her activism work since quitting acting was quite so well received.
In 2004 she was convicted by a French court and fined £4,000 for ‘inciting racial hatred’ in her book A Scream In The Silence.
She supported Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French elections and told people not to vote for Emmanuel Macron because he had a ‘coldness’ in his ‘steel eyes’.
‘Brigitte Bardot’s husband is a friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen, but neither of them is a party member. Bardot is not racist and not an extreme-right activist,’ Marie-Dominique Lelièvre, a close friend, said. ‘Bardot is Bardot, she defies definition.’
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