Brigitte Bardot would have turned 92 on Monday. It is the first birthday since her death, and the first September 28 in nine decades without her in Saint-Tropez. Bardot was born September 28, 1934, in Paris, and she died on December 28, 2025, at La Madrague, her home on the Mediterranean, at 91. According to Newsweek, her husband Bernard d’Ormale confirmed the cause was cancer, saying, “It was cancer that took her away.” He said she had suffered severe back pain after two cancer operations in her final months.
Her fame arrived like weather. ‘And God Created Woman’ in 1956, directed by her first husband Roger Vadim, made her the most photographed woman in the world before she was 23. ‘The Truth’ in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Le Mepris’ in 1963 and ‘Viva Maria!’ in 1965 followed, and the initials B.B. became shorthand for a whole idea of French glamour. Then, in 1973, at 39, she stopped. She retired from acting completely and never came back, which is one reason the image never aged.
The second half of her life belonged to animals. She founded the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in 1986 and spent the next four decades campaigning against fur, seal hunting and the mistreatment of livestock, often with more fury than tact. When she died, French President Emmanuel Macron called her “a legend of the century,” according to Wikipedia, and the Societe Protectrice des Animaux, France’s oldest animal welfare group, called her “an iconic and passionate figure for the animal cause.” She married d’Ormale in 1992, and they were together for 33 years. Monday would have been 92. The beach is still there, and so is every frame she left behind.
