Entertainment
Brigitte Bardot, France’s prototype of liberated female sexuality, dies
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Long withdrawn from the entertainment industry, Bardot died at her home in southern France, Bruno Jacquelin of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals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.
In 1977, a man named Tony Kiritsis fell behind on mortgage payments for an Indianapolis, Indiana, property that he hoped to develop into an affordable shopping center for independent merchants. He asked his mortgage broker for more time, but was denied. This enraged him because he suspected that the broker and his father, who owned the company, were conspiring to defraud him by letting the property go into foreclosure and acquire it for much less than market value. He showed up at the offices of the mortgage company, Meridian, for a scheduled appointment regarding the debt in the broker’s office, where he took the broker, Richard O. Hall, hostage, and demanded $130,000 to settle the debt, plus a public apology from the company. He carried a long cardboard box containing a shotgun with a so-called dead man’s wire, which he affixed to Hall as a precaution against police interference: if either of them were shot, tackled, or even caused to stumble, the wire would pull the trigger, blowing Hall’s head off.
That’s only the beginning of an astonishing story that has inspired many retellings, including a memoir by Hall, a 2018 documentary (whose producers were consultants on this movie) and a podcast drama starring Jon Hamm as Tony Kiritsis. And now it’s the best current movie you likely haven’t heard about—a drama from director Gus Van Sant (“Good Will Hunting”), starring Bill Skarsgård as Tony Kiritsis and Dacre Montgomery as Richard Hall. It’s unabashedly inspired by the best crime dramas from the 1970s, including “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Sugarland Express,” “Network,” and “Badlands,” and can stand proudly alongside them.
From the opening sequence, which scores the high-strung Tony’s pre-crime prep with Deodato’s immortally groovy disco version of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” played on the radio by one of Tony’s local heroes, the philosophical DJ Fred Temple (Colman Domingo); through the expansive middle section, which establishes Tony as part of a thriving community that will see him as their representative in the one-sided struggle between labor and capital; through the ending and postscript, which leave you unsure how to feel about what you’ve seen but eager to discuss it with others, “Dead Man’s Wire” is a nostalgia trip of the best kind. Rather than superficially imitate the style of a specific type of ’70s drama, Van Sant and his collaborators connect with the essence of what made them powerful and memorable: their connection to issues that weighed on viewers’ minds fifty years ago and that have grown heavier since.
Tony is far from a criminal genius or a potential folk hero, but thinks he’s both. The shotgun box with a weird bulge, barely held together with packing tape, is a correlative of the mentality of the man who carries it. His home is filled with counterculture-adjacent books, but he’s a slob who loudly gripes during a brief car ride that his “shorts have been ridin’ up since Market Street,” and has a vanity license plate that reads “TOPLESS.” His eloquence runs the gamut from Everyman acuity to self-canceling nonsense slathered in profanity . He accurately sums up the mortgage company’s practices as “a private equity trap” (a phrase that looks ahead to the 2008 financial collapse, which was sparked by predatory lending on subprime mortgages) and hopes that his extreme actions will generate some “some goddamn catharsis” for himself and his fellow citizens, and “some genuine guilt” among Indianapolis’ lending class.
He’s also intoxicated by his sudden local fame. The hostage situation migrates from the mortgage company to Tony’s shabby apartment complex, which is quickly surrounded by beat cops, tactical officers, and reporters (including Myha’La as Linda Page, a twenty-something, Black local TV correspondent looking to move up. Tony also forces his way into the life of his idol Temple, who tapes a phone conversation with him, previews it for police, and grudgingly accepts their or-else request to continue the dialog and plays their regular talks on his morning show.
Despite these inroads, Tony is unable to prevent his inner petty schmuck from emerging and undermining his message, such as it is. He vacillates between treating Hall as a useless representative of the financial elite (when the elder Hall finally agrees to speak with Tony via phone from a tropical vacation, Tony sneers to Hall the younger, “Your daddy’s on the line—he wants to know when you’ll be home for supper!”) and connecting with him on a human level. When he’s not bombastic, he’s needy and fawning. “I like you!” he keeps telling people he just met, but Fred most of all—as if a Black man who’d built a comfortable life for himself and his wife in 1977 Indiana could say no when an overwhelmingly white police force asked him to become Tony’s fake-confidant; and as if it matters whether a hostage-taking gunman feels warmly towards him.
Ultimately, though, making perfect sense and effecting lasting change are no higher on Tony’s agenda than they were for the protagonists of “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Network.” Like them, these are unhinged audience surrogates whose media stardom turned them into human megaphones for anger at the miserable state of things, and the indifference of institutions that caused or worsened it. These include local law enforcement, which—to paraphrase hapless bank robber Sonny Wirtzik taunting cops in “Dog Day Afternoon”—wanna kill Tony so bad that they can taste it. The discussions between Indianapolis police and the FBI (represented by Neil Mulac’s Agent Patrick Mullaney, a straight-outta-Quantico robot) are all about how to set up and take the kill shot.
The aforementioned phone call leads to a gut-wrenching moment that echoes the then-recent kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, when hostage-takers called their victim’s wealthy grandfather to arrange ransom payment, and got nickel-and-dimed as if they were trying to sell him a used car. The elder Hall is played by “Dog Day Afternoon” star Al Pacino, inspired casting that not only officially connects Tony with Wirtzik but proves that, at 85, Pacino can still bring the heat. The character’s presence creeps into the rest of the story like a toxic fog, even when he’s not the subject of conversation.
With his frizzy grey toupee, self-satisfied Midwest twang, and punchable smirk, Pacino is skin-crawlingly perfect as an old man who built a fortune on being good at one thing, but thinks that makes him a fountain of wisdom on all things, including the conduct of Real Men in a land of women and sissies. After watching TV coverage of Tony getting emotional while keeping his shotgun on Richard, Jr., he beams with pride that Tony shed tears but his own son didn’t. (Kelly Lynch, who costarred in another classic Van Sant film about American losers, “Drugstore Cowboy,” plays Richard, Sr.’s trophy wife, who is appalled at being confronted with irrefutable evidence of her husband’s monstrousness, but still won’t say a word against him.)
Van Sant was 25 during the real-life incidents that inspired this movie. That may partly account for the physical realism of the production, which doesn’t feel created but merely observed, in the manner of ’70s movies whose authenticity was strengthened by letting the main characters’ dialogue overlap and compete with ambient sounds; shooting in existing locations when possible, and dressing the actors in clothes that looked as if they’d been hanging in regular folks’ closets for years. Peggy Schnitzer did the costumes, Stefan Dechant the production design, and Arnaud Poiter the cinematography, all of which figuratively wear bell-bottom pants and platform shoes; the soundscape was overseen by Leslie Schatz, who keeps the environments believably dense and filled with incidental sounds while making sure the important stuff can be understood. It should also be mentioned that the film’s blueprint is an original script by a first-timer, Adam Kolodny, with a bona-fide working class worldview; he wrote it while working as a custodian at the Los Angeles Zoo.
More impressive than the film’s behind-the-scenes pedigree is its vision of another time that unexpectedly comes to seem not too different from this one. It is both a lovingly constructed time machine highlighting details that now seem as antiquated as lithography and buckboard wagons (the film deserves a special Oscar just for its phones) and a wide-ranging consideration of indestructible realities of life in the United States, which are highlighted in such a way that you notice them without feeling as if the movie pointed at them.
For instance, consider Tony’s infatuation with Fred Temple, which peaks when Tony honors his hero by demonstrating his “soul dancing” for his hostage, is a pre-Internet version of what we would now call a “parasocial relationship.” An awareness of racial dynamics is baked into this, and into the film as a whole. Domingo’s performance as Temple captures the tightrope walk that Black celebrities have to pull off, reassuring their most excitable white fans that they understand and care about them without cosigning condescension or behavior that could escalate into harassment. Consider, too, the matter-of-fact presentation of how easy it is for violence-prone people to buddy up to law enforcement officers, especially when they inhabit the same spaces. When Indianapolis police detective Will Grable (Cary Elwes) approaches Tony on a public street soon after the kidnapping, Tony’s face brightens as he exclaims, “Hi Mike! Nice to see you!”
And then, of course, there’s the economic and political framework, which is built with a firm yet delicate hand, and compassion for the vibrant messiness of life. “Dead Man’s Wire” depicts an analog era in which crises like this one were treated as important local matters that involved local people, businesses, and government agents, rather than fuel for a global agitprop industry posing as a news media, and a parasitic army of self-proclaimed influencers reycling the work of other influencers for clout. Van Sant’s movie continually insists on the uniqueness and value of every life shown onscreen, however briefly glimpsed, from the many unnamed citizens who are shown silently watching news coverage of the crisis while working their day jobs, to Fred’s right hand at the radio station, an Asian-American stoner dude (Vinh Nguyen) with a closet-sized office who talent-scouts unknown bands while exhaling cumulus clouds of pot smoke.
All this is drawn together by Van Sant and editor Saar Klein in pop music-driven montages that show how every member of the community depicted in this story is connected, even if they don’t know it or refuse to admit it. As John Donne put it, “No man is an island/Entire of itself/Each is a piece of the continent/A part of the main.” The struggle of the individual is summed up in one of Fred’s hypnotic radio monologues: “Let’s remember to become the ocean, not disappear into it.”
Entertainment
‘Sinners,’ ‘One Battle After Another’ and ‘Hamnet’ among 2026 Producers Guild of America nominees
The Oscar race for best picture came into clearer focus as the Producers Guild of America announced its annual nominees for the Darryl F. Zanuck Award on Friday morning. The 10 nominees (full list below) represent established Oscar-season contenders like “Sinners,” “One Battle After Another,” “Hamnet” and “Marty Supreme,” as well as a handful of films whose awards footing is less certain, including “Weapons,” “F1” and “Bugonia.”
The Producers Guild Awards are considered one of the most reliable bellwethers in the Oscar race because their preferential ballot closely mirrors the academy’s best picture voting system. The PGA Awards have named the future best picture winner in 17 of the last 22 years. Last year, eight of the 10 PGA nominees went on to receive best picture Oscar nominations, including Sean Baker’s “Anora,” which ultimately won both prizes.
Winners will be announced at the PGA’s awards ceremony on Feb. 28 at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Century City.
See the full list of nominees below:
Darryl F. Zanuck Award for outstanding producer of theatrical motion pictures
“Bugonia”
“F1”
“Frankenstein”
“Hamnet”
“Marty Supreme”
“One Battle After Another”
“Sentimental Value”
“Sinners”
“Train Dreams”
“Weapons”
Award for outstanding producer of animated theatrical motion pictures
“The Bad Guys 2”
“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle”
“Elio”
“KPop Demon Hunters”
“Zootopia 2”
Norman Felton Award for outstanding producer of episodic television — drama
“Andor”
“The Diplomat”
“The Pitt”
“Pluribus”
“Severance”
“The White Lotus”
Danny Thomas Award for outstanding producer of episodic television — comedy
“The Bear”
“Hacks”
“Only Murders in the Building”
“South Park”
“The Studio”
David L. Wolper Award for outstanding producer of limited or anthology series television
“Adolescence”
“The Beast in Me”
“Black Mirror”
“Black Rabbit”
“Dying for Sex”
Award for outstanding producer of televised or streamed motion pictures
“Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”
“The Gorge”
“John Candy: I Like Me”
“Mountainhead”
“Nonnas”
Award for outstanding producer of nonfiction television
“aka Charlie Sheen”
“Billy Joel: And So It Goes”
“Mr. Scorsese”
“Pee-wee as Himself”
“SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night”
Award for outstanding producer of live entertainment, variety, sketch, standup and talk television
“The Daily Show”
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”
“SNL50: The Anniversary Special”
Award for outstanding producer of game and competition television
“The Amazing Race”
“Jeopardy!”
“RuPaul’s Drag Race”
“Top Chef”
“The Traitors”
Movie Reviews
Controversy Surrounds ‘The Raja Saab’ as Makers Allegedly Offer Money for Positive Reviews | – The Times of India
Prabhas-starrer ‘The Raja Saab’ is currently running in theaters; the much-awaited film was released today. The early reviews of the Maruthi-directed film have been receiving mixed to negative reviews on social media. However, a netizen has claimed that the makers of the film offered him money to delete his negative review.
Netizen alleges bribe by the makers
On Friday morning, an X user named @BS__unfiltered posted a screenshot online. He said he received a message from the official account of ‘The Raja Saab’ after posting his review. According to him, the film’s team offered him Rs 14,000. They reportedly asked him to post a positive review of the movie instead. Sharing the screenshot, the user wrote, “What the hell mannnnn!!!! They are offering me money to delete this!!! Nahi hoga delete #TheRajaSaab #Prabhas.” However, the screenshot shared by the user is in question for its authenticity and is not verified. At this time, it is not clear if the message was real or AI-generated. The claim is still unconfirmed.See More: The Raja Saab: Movie Review and Release Live Updates: Prabhas’ film to open big at the box office
Fans share their opinions online
Fans and netizens have been active on social media, sharing their opinions about the film. While some enjoyed it, many expressed disappointment. Another internet user wrote, “A horror-fantasy with a good idea but weak execution. Prabhas gives an energetic & comical performance, & the face-off with Sanjay Dutt is the main highlight. The palace setting is interesting at first, but the messy screenplay, dragged 2nd half, uneven VFX, & weak emotional payoff reduce the impact. @MusicThaman’s music & sounding are one of the positives. From the end of the first half, the story becomes slightly interesting. There are 3 songs featuring Prabhas & @AgerwalNidhhi. Nidhhi has performed well. Some scenes feel unintentionally funny, & the climax fails to impress. Overall, a one-time watch at best. This film gives a lead for The Raja Saab Circus—1935 (Part 2), where we may see Prabhas vs. Prabhas.”
About ‘The Raja Saab’
‘The Raja Saab’ is directed and written by Maruthi. The film stars Prabhas in the lead role. The cast also includes Malavika Mohanan, Nidhhi Agerwal, Riddhi Kumar, Sanjay Dutt, and Boman Irani.
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