Brigitte Bardot 1934 -2025

France's most sensational cultural export, who on screen epitomised youth, sex and modernity until politics and her campaigns for animal rights took over

- Peter Bradshaw

Bardot... there was a time when it couldn't be pronounced without a knowing pout on the second syllable. French headline-writers loved calling the world's most desirable film star by her initials: "BB", that is: bébé. When Brigitte Bardot retired from the movies in the mid-70s, taking up the cause of animal rights and a ban on the import of baby seals, the French press took to calling her BB-phoque, a homophone of the French for "baby seal" with a nasty hint of an Anglo pun. But France's love affair with Bardot - who has died, aged 91 - was to curdle, despite her fierce patriotism.

As her animal rights campaigning morphed in the 21st century into an attack on halal meat, and then into shrill attacks on the alleged "Islamicisation" of France, her relations with the modern world curdled even more.

In the 1950s, before the sexual revolution, before the New Wave, before feminism, there was Bardot: she was sex, she was youth, and, more to the point, Bardot was modernity.