Bébé was modernity

Screen siren charmed the globe

- 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, a bit of weirdly infantilised tabloid pillow-talk.

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 was to curdle, despite her fierce patriotism and admiration for Charles de Gaulle. (The feeling was reciprocated.) 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. She was the zeitgeist force that stirred cinema's young lions such as François Truffaut against the old order.