It never fails—some major celeb always dies at the very end of the year, just in time to screw up the year-end issues and make TCM scramble. This year it’s pouty, tousle-haired French sex kitten Brigitte Bardot, 91, who died on Dec. 28. Promoted by first husband Roger Vadim, she became a star in such films as Le Trou Normand, The Girl in the Bikini, Helen of Troy, Babette Goes to War, and most successfully, . . . And God Created Woman. Through the 1960s, she appeared in such films as Vie Privée, Contempt, Spirits of the Dead, The Novice, Viva Maria!, and Dear Brigitte; she retired from acting in 1973, bemoaning the fate of the aging beauty: “I tried to make myself as pretty as possible and even then I thought I was ugly. I found it madly difficult to go out, to show myself. I was afraid of not living up to what people expected me to be.” Since then Bardot kept in the news through her animal-rights activism and wildly controversial opinions, managing to offend both the right and the left (she got fined by the French government or just generally derided, for her chuckle-headed rants about Jews, Muslims, gays, feminists, etc.). Bardot told the London Times in 2006, “I don’t often think of my film career — only in as much as my name can be important in influencing people.”
