Brigitte Bardot, the French actor idealized for her beauty and heralded in the midcentury as the prototype of liberated female sexuality, has died at 91.

Long withdrawn from the entertainment industry, Bardot died at her home in southern France, Bruno Jacquelin of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals confirmed to the Associated Press. He gave no cause of death. Bardot had dealt with infirm health in recent years, including hospitalization for a breathing issue in July 2023 and additional hospital stays in 2025.

Bardot was known for being mercurial, self-destructive and prone to reckless love affairs with men and women. She was a fashion icon and media darling who left acting at 39 and lived out the rest of her years in near seclusion, emerging periodically to champion animal rights, lecture about moral decay and espouse bigoted political views.

And, as if in protest of her famed beauty, Bardot happily allowed herself to age naturally.

“With me, life is made up only of the best and the worst, of love and hate,” she told the Guardian in 1996. “Everything that happened to me was excessive.”

In her prime, Bardot was considered a national treasure in France, received by President Charles de Gaulle at the Élysée Palace and analyzed exhaustively by existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. She was the girl whose poster adorned the bedroom of a teenage John Lennon.

While Marilyn Monroe was playing it coy, Bardot was forthright and free about her sexuality, sleeping with her leading men without apology, sweaty and writhing barefoot on a table in the controversial 1956 film “…And God Created Woman.” Though many of her films were largely forgettable, she projected a radical sense of self-empowerment for women that had a lasting cultural influence.

Born Sept. 28, 1934, in Paris, the daughter of a Parisian factory owner and his socialite wife, Bardot and her younger sister were raised in a religious Catholic home.

Bardot studied ballet at the Paris Conservatoire and, at her mother’s urging, pursued modeling. By 14, she was on the cover of Elle magazine. She caught the eye of filmmaker Marc Allegret, who sent his 20-year-old apprentice, Roger Vadim, to locate her.

Vadim and Bardot began a years-long affair during which he cultivated the sex-kitten persona that would seduce the world. But Bardot wasn’t one to be cultivated. As Vadim once said, “She doesn’t act. She exists.”

Bardot married Vadim at 18, and that same year he directed her in “…And God Created Woman,” as a woman who falls in love with her older husband’s younger brother. The film, which prompted moral outrage in the U.S. and was heavily edited before it reached theaters, made Bardot a star and an emblem of French modernity.

“I wanted to show a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved in the way a boy might, without any sense of guilt on a moral or sexual level,” Vadim said at the time.

In real life, Bardot left Vadim for her costar Jean-Louis Trintignant. She went on to master a comic-erotic persona in the popular 1957 comedy “Une Parisienne” and portrayed a young delinquent in the 1958 drama “Love Is My Profession.”

By 1959, she was pregnant with the child of French actor Jacques Charrier, whom she married as a result. Together they had a son, Nicolas.

In Bardot’s scathing 1996 memoir, “Initiales B.B: Mémoires,” she details her crude attempts to abort the child, asking doctors for morphine and punching herself in the stomach. Nine months after the baby was born, she said, she downed a bottle of sleeping pills and slit her wrists, the first of several apparent suicide attempts during her life. When Bardot recovered, she gave up custody of her son and divorced Charrier.

“I couldn’t be Nicolas’ roots because I was completely uprooted, unbalanced, lost in that crazy world,” she explained years later.

Bardot earned her greatest box-office success in the 1960 noir drama “The Truth,” playing a woman on trial for the murder of her lover. Her best performance likely came in Jean-Luc Godard’s acclaimed 1963 melancholy adaptation “Contempt,” as a wife who falls out of love with her husband. She was later nominated for a BAFTA award for her performance as a circus entertainer turned political operative in the 1965 comedy “Viva Maria!”

All the while, though, Bardot courted drama and lived large.

While she was married to German industrialist Gunter Sachs, she had an affair with French pop star Serge Gainsbourg. He wrote Bardot the erotic love song “Je t’aime … moi non plus,” which went on to become a hit by Donna Summer, altered and retitled “Love to Love You Baby.” By 1969, she had divorced Sachs and was romantically linked to everyone from Warren Beatty to Jimi Hendrix.

The celebrity life eventually exhausted Bardot, and she grew to fear that she’d end up dying young like Marilyn Monroe or withering away in public view like Rita Hayworth. Though she exuded confidence, she admitted in her memoir that she battled depression as she sought to juggle the many moving pieces of her chaotic life.

“The majority of great actresses met tragic ends,” she told the Guardian. “When I said goodbye to this job, to this life of opulence and glitter, images and adoration, the quest to be desired, I was saving my life.”

Nearing 40, she quit acting and spent the rest of her life bouncing between her Saint-Tropez beach house and a farm — complete with a chapel — outside Paris. She devoted herself to the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals.

As an animal rights activist, her list of enemies was long: the Japanese for hunting whales, the Spanish for bullfighting, the Russians for killing seals, the furriers, hunters and circus operators.

At her home in Saint-Tropez, dozens of cats and dogs — along with goats, sheep and a horse — wandered freely. She chased away fishermen and was sued for sterilizing a neighbor’s goat.

“My chickens are the happiest in the world, because I have been a vegetarian for the past 20 years,” Bardot said.

In 1985 she was awarded the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest civilian decoration, but refused to collect it until President François Mitterrand agreed to close the royal hunting grounds.

In 1992 she married Bernard d’Ormale, a former aide to Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front and frequent candidate for France’s presidency. Later, Bardot became an ardent supporter of Le Pen’s daughter Marine, leader of France’s anti-immigration far right.

Two French civil rights groups sued Bardot for the xenophobic and homophobic comments she made in her 2003 book, “A Cry in the Silence,” in which she rails against Muslims, gays, intellectuals, drug abusers, female politicians, illegal immigrants and the “professionally” unemployed. She was ultimately fined six times for inciting racial hatred, mostly while speaking out against Muslims and Jews. She was fined again in 2021 over a 2019 rant wherein she dubbed the residents of Réunion, a French Island in the Indian Ocean, “degenerate savages.”

“I never had trouble saying what I have to say,” Bardot wrote in a 2010 letter to The Times. “As for being a little bunny that never says a word, that is truly the opposite of me.”

Bardot stirred controversy again in 2018 when she dismissed the #MeToo movement as a campaign fueled by a “hatred of men.”

“I thought it was nice to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass,” she told NBC. “This kind of compliment is nice.”

She remained firm in those views in the final year of her life, decrying the societal shaming of playwright-comedian-actor Nicolas Bedos and actor Gérard Depardieu, who were both convicted of sexual assault. “People with talent who grab a girl’s bottom are thrown into the bottom of the ditch,” she declared in a 2025 TV interview, her first in 11 years. “We could at least let them carry on living.”

As she aged, Bardot mostly kept to herself, content to do the crossword puzzle when the newspaper arrived, tend to her menagerie and mail off hotly written pleas to world leaders to halt their animal abuses. She was largely vague when asked if she was still married to D’Ormale.

“It depends what day it is,” she said, laughing gently.

Piccalo is a former Times staff writer. Former staff writer Steve Marble contributed to this report.

Story: Eesha centres on four friends who take it upon themselves to expose fake godmen and challenge blind belief systems that exploit fear and faith. What begins as a rational, investigative effort soon places them in an unfamiliar and unsettling environment, where unexplained incidents begin to blur the line between superstition and the supernatural. Review: Set largely within a confined, eerie space, the film attempts to merge social commentary with a traditional horror framework, positioning belief itself as the central conflict. Director Srinivas Manne establishes the premise with clarity, and the initial idea holds promise. The early portions focus on setting up the group dynamic and their motivation, grounding the narrative in realism before introducing supernatural elements. However, the film takes time to find its rhythm. The first half moves sluggishly, spending too long on familiar horror mechanics such as sudden loud noises, jump scares and predictable scare setups, which reduces their effectiveness over time.Performance-wise, Hebah Patel as Nayana and Adith Arun as Kalyan deliver earnest and committed performances, lending credibility to the film’s emotional core. Their reactions and emotional beats feel genuine, helping the audience stay invested despite the slow pace. Siri Hanumanth and Akhil Raj Uddemari support the narrative adequately, though their characters are written with limited depth, offering little room to leave a lasting impression. The supporting cast complements the leads well and helps maintain engagement during stretched sequences.Technically, the film benefits from effective sound design and atmospheric visuals that occasionally succeed in creating tension. The supernatural mystery does manage to grip attention in parts, particularly when the film leans into mood rather than shock value. However, the prolonged buildup works against the story, dulling the impact of a key twist in the climax that could have been far more effective with tighter pacing.While Eesha is driven by a unique concept that questions blind faith through a horror lens, the execution falls short of its potential. A more polished script and sharper screenplay might have elevated the film into a more compelling and consistently chilling experience.— Sanjana Pulugurtha

Nobody does a jaw-drop reaction like Bobby Berk. It’s only surprising when you assume he’s probably seen it all after eight seasons traveling the world as the interior design expert on Netflix’s reboot of “Queer Eye”; writing his 2023 book, “Right at Home: How Good Design is Good for the Mind”; making many TV appearances (including a Taylor Swift video) and selling pretty much anything to make your home shine on BobbyBerk.com.

But in his new HGTV series “Junk or Jackpot?”, premiering Friday at 9:30 p.m. Pacific, genuine reactions come often from Burke as he enters the homes of Los Angeles collectors and sees not only rooms jam-packed with action figures, pinball machines, puppets, marionettes and more, but also some jackpot items just sitting on a bookshelf. In one episode, for example, a collector shows Berk a trading card he has that is appraised in the $100,000 range. “I’m pretty sure I said, ‘What the f—?’ though I assume it was bleeped because it’s HGTV,” says Berk from his Los Angeles home. “I’m used to Netflix, where I could say whatever I wanted. But, yeah, that was just crazy to me.”

Reactions aside, the real marvel on “Junk or Jackpot?” is watching an enthusiastic Berk swoop into people’s homes to help them learn how to come to terms with a collecting hobby that has grown into something that’s stifling homes and putting a damaging strain on relationships. “Obviously, I’m not a therapist. I’m a designer, even though in our field, we often make the joke that we’re not just designers, we’re marriage counselors,” he says.

But Berk, born in Houston and raised in conservative Mount Vernon, Mo., is a self-taught pro at identifying what isn’t working and doing everything possible to fix it, including in his own life. Case in point: Berk, not feeling safe coming out in Mount Vernon, left home at 15 and bounced around for several years in various cities, never finishing high school. “From 15 to 22, I moved around and can’t even count the amount of places I had to move around to just due to finances and situations going on in life,” he recalls.

Eventually, he landed in New York City and worked for stores like Restoration Hardware, Bed Bath & Beyond and Portico before he opened his first online store in 2006 and first physical store in Soho in 2007. Soon thereafter, Berk was racking up appearances on networks like HGTV and Bravo before “Queer Eye” came calling in 2018 and took him to new heights, including his 2023 Emmy win for structured reality program. He also received an honorary degree from Otis College of Art and Design in 2022.

Now, with “Junk or Jackpot?” about to launch, the 44-year-old Berk spoke about how he was handpicked by pro wrestler and movie star John Cena for the show, the key to helping collectors let go of things that are weighing down their lives, and, after living many places and traveling the globe, where he considers home with husband Dewey Do and their mini Labradoodle, Bimini.

What are the origins of “Junk or Jackpot?” and what does John Cena have to do with it all?

I’ve been toying back and forth with HGTV for years, even when I was still on “Queer Eye,” but with my exclusivity with Netflix, I couldn’t do design shows with anybody else. We always just kept that line of communication open, so then when this specific opportunity came about, Loren Ruch, the head of HGTV, who’s unfortunately since passed, reached out. He said, “Hey, John Cena’s created the show for us and you’re the top of his list of who he wants it to host it.” John was a big “Queer Eye” fan, so I said yes. It shot here in L.A., which was really important to me. We were really lacking for entertainment jobs here in the city so that was a big plus for me to be able to bring jobs here to L.A. to all of our amazing crews.

And it’s not your typical design show. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with a typical design show and they do help people. But coming from “Queer Eye” where everyone we helped was because it was somebody deserving, somebody that was going through something and needed that extra boost in their life. That’s what this was with “Junk or Jackpot?”

Every single collector, as we’re calling them, had a story going on. With Patrick and Roger [in the premiere episode], Roger had moved out and their relationship was on the rocks because there was literally no space for Roger. With Carly and Johnny in another episode, they had a kid that they weren’t expecting to have in their early 40s, so it was a life-changing moment for them. Their priority needed to be their son, J.D.

I love the show because it was helping people at these moments in their life where they’re like, “We have this thing that we love and has brought us joy, but now this thing is actually starting to have negative things happening in our life.” I wanted to come in and really bring back the joyous part of their collection.

HGTV hasn’t given you a huge budget to revamp the homes and the collectors have to work themselves to sell off their collectibles to pay for the renovation. How did that angle come about?

It was a bit of therapy and I wanted the collectors to really realize that, yes, the collection that they have has value but this other thing that is happening in their life because of this collection has value, too. I wanted them to either be able to prove to themselves that what they were wanting to change in their life had more value than those things. Like with Patrick, Roger had a value.

I wanted them to go through the exercise of “You need to start parting with things.” And if you notice, I never pushed them to get rid of the most precious pieces of their collection. I pushed them to get rid of the things that often they had duplicates of but weren’t necessarily something like, “Oh, I got this as a child” or “somebody got this for me.” I wanted them to emotionally disconnect with those things so they could prioritize things better in life and in the future, they would have a lot easier time letting go even if I wasn’t there to push them.

Swatches and mood boards in Berk’s office. The host of “Junk or Jackpot?” says it is not your typical design show. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

How do you consider budget with the collectors? In one episode, you choose to cover a brick wall instead of tearing it down and building a new one.

The homeowners are the ones footing the bill for this, because again, a portion of this is the exercise of letting go. To your point, if we had just come in at HGTV and said, “Here’s all the money!” They’re like, “All right, I have no motivation to get rid of anything.” I wanted to make sure we made budget-conscious decisions and I think that’s also a really important thing to share with people at home that you don’t always have to go out and knock out a fireplace if you hate the material. You can do a thing like micro cement and you can completely change it for a minimal cost.

What would you say you learned from shooting the first season of “Junk or Jackpot?”

I wouldn’t say I learned anything necessarily new, but it was reaffirmed to me the emotional attachment and mental health aspect that your space and design can have on you, either in a good way or a bad way.

In the bad way, your house becomes so cluttered and overwhelmed with something that used to spark joy for you, but it’s now having an effect on not only your mental health, but your relationships with other people. On the other hand, the difference in your mental health just redoing that space, reorganizing that space, reclaiming that space can have on your mental health and your relationships not only with yourself, but with your family and your friends.

Vivian, who collects Wonder Woman memorabilia, her friends stopped coming over because there was just nowhere to sit. Her best girlfriend used to come in from Vegas all the time, where she lives, and she would spend the night and now she’s like, “I just can’t anymore because I’m surrounded literally. It’s too much and I just can’t do it anymore.” You see how just changing your space really can change your life.

“I wanted to make sure we made budget-conscious decisions and I think that’s also a really important thing to share with people at home, that you don’t always have to go out and knock out a fireplace if you hate the material,” Berk says.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Season 1 is set in Los Angeles but assuming you get more seasons, would you want to do other cities or countries?

I personally would always love just to keep doing L.A. I live there and with “Queer Eye” for eight years, we traveled all over America. That being said, this is a very niche show, so it might be hard to continue doing it in the same city season after season, so we probably will have to go to other cities, and I’d be fine with that. But I would at least like another season or two in L.A. After spending the last eight years filming “Queer Eye,” I like being home.

That said, you have lived in New York, you’re in L.A. now and you also have a place in Portugal. Where do you call home?

L.A. is definitely home for me. Portugal’s great, but L.A. is definitely home. Although the more time we spend in Southeast Asia, specifically Vietnam, since my husband’s originally from there, that also feels like home. I believe in reincarnation, and I was definitely from over there in my last life. Like when I landed in Vietnam, in China, anywhere in Southeast Asia — I just feel very at home.

“Queer Eye” was such a roller coaster for all you guys but what are your reflections now that it is behind you? Were you able to enjoy it at the time?

Yes and no. It was an amazing roller coaster. I enjoyed most of it, but there were times where we were just exhausted. I don’t know if you know the flight app “Flighty,” but it tracks your flights and tells you how many hours you’ve been in planes every year and how many times you’ve been on the exact same plane. I was looking the other day at how much I flew in 2019. Keep in mind in 2019, five months of the year I was filming, so I wasn’t flying anywhere. So this was just seven months, and I flew 200 flights. I flew over 500,000 miles. I don’t miss that. That was a lot. But as much as I can remember of it, I look back with fondness.