The suicidal sex bomb: As Brigitte Bardot celebrates her 75th birthday, a friend reveals a life lived between bed and bedlam

By Peter Evans for MailOnline
Updated: 05:00 EDT, 24 September 2009

At dinner one evening in Paris, at the height of her fame, I accused Brigitte Bardot of living her life between bed and bedlam. She smiled beatifically and crossed herself. 'Please God, let it last for ever and ever,' she said.

Her reaction revealed a kind of absurd faith, since even the most casual reader of newspaper headlines at that time knew that the chances of her sustaining her frantic lifestyle even until her 75th birthday next week were next to zero.

In the Sixties and early Seventies, there was no better known - or more scandalous - movie star on earth. 

Raunchy: Brigitte Bardot, posing naked on a beach, became the ultimate sex symbol

Her amorous anarchy had become a public entertainment, even a kind of bloodsport: lovers brawled over her outside Paris nightclubs; husbands came and went with provocative proximity.

'I like one to be in sight before the other goes,' she told me, explaining how she deliberately rotated the men in her life. 'Nobody has any security in loving me.'

I admired her bravado - especially because her own sense of security was hardly impregnable. Frequently, in times of crisis, she would try to kill herself.

On one occasion, her grief-stricken fans ransacked the Riviera villa where she had taken an overdose before slashing her wrists, and removed bloodstained curtains, linen and even bathroom tiles for souvenirs.

Not since the death of Valentino had a star aroused such insane devotion in their fans.

'Death was a danger she toyed with often,' said Roger Vadim, Bardot's first husband, and the man many people still regard as her Svengali. 'Death always had a strong fascination for her.'

It was certainly puzzling that a woman who'd had a spoilt, bourgeois childhood developed an apparent fixation on death and suicide. As a child, she'd had ballet classes, a governess and private tuition.

'My mother wanted me to be friends only with children she considered socially suitable,' she once told me, with regret as well as disapproval in her voice.

She had been a plain child. She wore wire-rimmed spectacles, favoured Victorian hair ribbons and wore a brace on her protruding, untidy teeth for so long that it permanently exaggerated her mouth, moulding the look that later inspired Time magazine to call her 'the princess of pout, the countess of come-hither'.

Bewitching: Bardot in 1959 transformed from the ugly child she once was

'What is the name when you are not pretty?' she once asked me. 'Ugly? Yes, I knew I was ugly as a child. I said to myself: "Well, I am ugly, so I must at least be bright and funny and have other things to compensate." I knew I had to be the best at something, otherwise I would be nothing. I knew I wanted the world to know about Brigitte Bardot.'

But she was also troubled. 'I never believed she could survive her own passions,' Vadim said of her first suicide bid at the age of 18, when she had attempted to gas herself after her parents refused to let her marry him.

Six years older than Bardot, journalist and aspiring screenwriter Vadim was regarded with deep suspicion by Bardot's strict, Roman Catholic family when he started dating her. When her maternal grandmother met Vadim for the first time, she warned the rest of the family to 'watch the silver'.

Vadim wisely kept his hands off the silver, but found it difficult to keep them off Brigitte. In December 1952, three weeks after her first unsuccessful suicide bid - and her vow that she would go on trying until her parents had a change of heart - they were married in Notre-Dame de Grace, Paris.

But while Bardot had hooked the husband she wanted, Vadim had other ambitions. He planned to make his new wife a star, despite the fact that friends had warned him that she was not filmstar material.

Bardot, pictured here in Only For Love in 1961, with director Roger Vadim who has his back to the camera. The pair had wed in 1952 and he vowed to make her a star

Long before it was fashionable to do so, Bardot had assumed a working class accent and adopted its argot. Some accused her of having the manners of an 'insolent skivvy'.

Vadim was undeterred. 'Her walk is almost aristocratic and almost wanton. She is sex on legs,' he told producers, as he hawked her around Paris and Riviera studios.

'Without Vadim, my career would never have got started,' Bardot told me. 'But if I had not had something within myself, if I hadn't possessed some seed, for all Roger Vadim's wiles I would have disappeared without trace. Now, every day I must be recreated again, renewed by a lover, by me, by life.'

In 1953, a year after he began shopping his young wife around the studios, Vadim changed tactics and took her to the Cannes Film Festival.

She had appeared briefly in only three movies, but in Cannes, her tousled, sun-streaked tresses and air of innocent dishabille enabled her to upstage the Hollywood names of the day, including Lana Turner and Olivia de Havilland.

Posing, pouting, gate-crashing the best parties, she was pursued by photographers looking for new faces to canonise on the Croisette, Cannes' glamorous promenade.

Within days, her photographs began appearing in newspapers and magazines all over the world. The phenomenon did not go unnoticed in London.

Making it big: Bardot, pictured here with Sacha Distel, overshadowed the Hollywood stars at the Cannes film festival in 1953

Film producers Betty Box and Ralph Thomas decided that she was just the actress they needed to play a small, sexy role opposite Dirk Bogarde in the comedy Doctor At Sea.

The pair flew to Paris and met Vadim and his protegee in the bar of the Meurice Hotel. 'Brigitte could just about say "Good evening" in English, and "I'd like a whisky, please",' said Box.

Vadim did most of the talking. 'He must have spoken English pretty well,' said Thomas. 'He persuaded Betty to pay Brigitte £1,000 for the picture. We knew she'd never been paid so much money in her life.'

Bogarde, an inscrutable misogynist, was enchanted by Bardot. 'She was incredibly assertive,' he said. 'She taught me never to say: "No, I'm sorry, but . . ." If you don't want to do something, you must always say: "No!" She was positive. She was more in control of her destiny than people imagined.'

To the British film crew, used to the prudish ways of domestic sex symbols, Bardot oozed sex appeal. According to Richard Gordon, author of the Doctor film series, she had a highly magnetic smell, the result of overactive endocrine glands.

'It was the fragrance perfumers have been trying to capture for years without success,' said Box.

Bardot, pictured with co-star Alain Delon became a huge sex symbol

Either way, Doctor At Sea - an otherwise pleasant, insignificant comedy - was a turning point in Bardot's life. It gave her a new degree of independence from Vadim, which she was only too happy to explore.

Officially, Bardot stayed at a hotel close to Pinewood Studios. 'But she thoughtfully left plenty of other numbers where we might find her in an overnight emergency,' Box said.

'She would say to me: "What is the matter with British boys? They don't make love." She took it as a personal affront.'

Ralph Thomas corrected her. 'Brigitte didn't say don't make love. She said can't make love,' he said.

Vadim was neither surprised nor hurt by his wife's infidelity. 'I knew what was happening and rather expected it,' he said. 'I would always prefer to have that kind of wife, knowing she is unfaithful to me, rather than possess a woman who just loved me and no one else.

'I wanted a woman with spirit, with joie de vivre . . . a woman with a sense of adventure and sexual curiosity.'

At the end of the production, a publicist asked Bardot what she had learned during her stay in Britain. She said: 'The meaning of infidelity.'

Whether or not Bardot and Vadim spoke of their unfaithfulness to each other doesn't really matter; for each recognised the fact that the marriage was in all seriousness finished.

Enchanting: Bardot captured the hearts of many with her looks and her bravado

Many years later, after his marriage to Jane Fonda, when Vadim and I became friends, he recalled that time with a beguiling ingenuousness that defined his style: 'It was clear to me that Brigitte and I would have to split. It was obvious after just one year that the marriage was not for ever.'

But Vadim was an aspiring director and didn't want to end the marriage until he'd made at least one movie with his wife of which they could be proud.

'I felt responsible for her,' he said. 'Because of me she had quit ballet classes, which she loved. She had become an actress against her will.'

And he still believed in her star potential - when no one else did. She had not broken through the way Marilyn Monroe had in the U.S., and while she was getting a lot of publicity - and a few small parts in interesting movies such as the Hollywood epic Helen Of Troy, the distinguished Rene Clair's Les Grande Manoeuvres and Anatole Litvak's Act Of Love, in which she had one line - producers refused to take her seriously.

Then, in 1956, Vadim completed a screenplay he had written for her. And God Created Woman was a bad script and would be an awful film, but it did accurately portray the louche way people lived on the Riviera.

The producer, Raoul Levy, saw its box-office potential and hired Vadim to direct it and Bardot to star. Reminded that it meant directing Bardot in some raunchy love scenes, Vadim said: 'If I don't know how to direct my wife in that department, who the hell can?'

Roger Vadim described his wife as 'sex on legs' and she certainly oozed sex appeal

He cast Jean-Louis Trintignant as Bardot's lover. Inevitably - although Trintignant was married to beautiful French actress Stephane Audran - he and Bardot began a torrid affair.

Often the couple were oblivious to Vadim's cry of 'cut', and continued to embrace long after the camera had stopped rolling. Vadim's pursuit of realism became the talk of Paris.

'I never asked Brigitte to be more passionate. I asked her to be more sincere,' Vadim later told me, his eyes twinkling with wickedness. Nevertheless, despite the publicity the film received, its first run in Paris was a disappointment.

Bardot was distraught. One actor recalled her 'crumbling voice, her little dismal wound of a face.' She believed her movie career was over.

But when the overseas receipts started to come in, it was clear the picture was a smash.

In New York, where it had been booked for ten days, despite heavy censorship, it ran for ten months, and is still among the most successful foreign films ever to play in the U.S.

When the dust had settled, Bardot was the world's Number One sex symbol.

'I am not an actress. I can only play me - on and off the screen,' she said.

Meanwhile, five years after they were wed, Vadim and Bardot divorced by mutual consent. The court found them equally guilty of 'seriously insulting' each other. They, of course, remained good friends.

Bardot is now an active animal rights campaigner and is about to celebrate her 75th birthday

After Vadim, the story of her life, career and swell times followed an increasingly familiar pattern of scandalous affairs, suicide bids and turbulent marriages - four, including her present one to former Right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale.

For a time, she was obsessed with the kind of muscled young men - usually younger, poorer and far less successful than herself - found loitering along Riviera beaches.

In 1960, she had a son, Nicholas, with her second husband, actor Jacques Charrier. When they divorced two years later - again for 'seriously insulting' each other - Charrier took custody of their son.

'I'm not made to be a mother,' Bardot said. 'I don't know why I think this because I adore animals and I adore children, but I'm not adult enough - I know it's horrible to have to admit that, but I'm not adult enough to take care of a child.

'I need somebody to take care of me. I'm sad to have had that baby. What will be his life? People who are making babies and families now are mad. It is such a bad world.'

Meanwhile, political wrangles, racial tussles and animal rights issues have kept her in the headlines since her retirement, just before her 40th birthday in 1973. She has shown no signs of growing meeker with advancing age.

In a farewell salute to her old outrageousness - and her movie career - she celebrated her 40th birthday in 1973 with a nude spread in Playboy.

But her last hurrah did not spell the end of her notoriety - it launched a different kind of notoriety and a new determination to shock. Eschewing face-lifts and Botox, she is content to grow old and cranky before our eyes.

In 2004, she was convicted by a French court and fined £4,000 for 'inciting racial hatred' in her book, A Scream In The Silence, in which she warned of the 'Islamicisation of France'.

Last year, she combined her animal rights and racial concerns in a letter to Nicolas Sarkozy, when he was Interior Minister of France, complaining of the way Muslims were 'trying to take over France and impose their culture, values, lifestyles' on its people by slaughtering sheep without stunning them first. On that occasion, she was fined £12,000.

I am still fond of Bardot. Despite her eccentricities, she has a caring heart. And, as she approaches her 75th birthday, it is clear that Roger Vadim and I got it wrong. Brigitte Bardot has survived her passions spectacularly.