French cinema legend Brigitte Bardot, whose death at the age of 91 was announced on Sunday. During her life, she was a 1960s sex symbol who later became a militant animal rights activist and outspoken supporter of France’s far right.

After her film career catapulted her to global stardom and sex-symbol status, she suddenly retreated into a hermit-like existence in the French Riviera resort of Saint-Tropez at the age of just 39.

In 1986 she set up the Brigitte Bardot Foundation dedicated to animal protection. She crusaded for baby seals and elephants, called for the abolition of ritual animal sacrifice and the closure of horse abattoirs.

Convictions for inciting racial hatred

As her advocacy intensified, so too did the backlash to her political statements. Bardot’s public remarks on immigration, Islam and homosexuality led to a string of convictions for inciting racial hatred.

Between 1997 and 2008, she was fined six times by French courts for her comments, particularly those targeting France’s Muslim community.

In one case, a Paris court fined her €15,000 for describing Muslims as “this population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts”.

In 1992, she married Bernard d’Ormale, a former adviser to the far-right National Front, and later publicly endorsed the party’s successive leaders, Jean-Marie Le Pen ‍and his daughter Marine Le Pen. Bardot called the latter “the Joan of Arc of the 21st century”.

Read moreBrigitte Bardot risks prison for hate speech

Jordan Bardella, the head of Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, was among the first to pay hommage.

“Today the French people have lost the Marianne they so loved, whose beauty astonished the world,” he wrote on X.

In her final book, “Mon BBcedaire” (“My BB Alphabet”), published weeks before her death, she fired barbs at what she described as a “dull, sad, submissive” France and at her home town of Saint-Tropez, now packed with the wealthy tourists she helped attract. The book also contained derogatory remarks about gay and transgender people.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)