Directors have maintained that Brigitte was comparatively easy to work with on the set, trusting her team implicitly, rarely challenging instruction, but occasionally making suggestions of her own if she thought that a scene could be improved upon.

According to Roger Vadim and Nina Companeez, she was only tetchy if she was going through a break-up with a lover or husband—not losing her cool, but suddenly bursting into tears and having to abandon the take to have her make-up fixed.

“Any problems on the set could always be traced back to some man,” Companeez said.

At home, Bardot was always la patronne—the boss— telling Paris-Match in 2003:

Even when I was with a man, there was never really a man in my life, because I was always the one who was wearing the trousers. I really believe that throughout my whole life, I was the man in my life.

Priests denounced Bardot from the pulpit. Her entire life was spent courting controversy, while she was incapable of handling the resultant public backlash.

Like Garbo she retired from making films while comparatively young, since which time as a recluse she devoted her life to animal causes, notably the Brigitte Bardot Foundation.

An animal activist, she is known to have shared her bed with sick four-legged friends while relegating the man of the moment to the spare room. Occasionally, she emerged from this self-enforced solitude to give an interview, or more likely to let off steam over some contentious issue.

Bardot’s beauty may have faded slightly when she left the spotlight, but unlike most movie stars she refused cosmetic intervention, vowed to grow old as Nature intended she should—a promise she kept, and prevented her from acquiring the “mutton-dressed-as-lamb” status of some contemporaries.

She contended with ill-health which frequently left her housebound. Yet the image of the drop-dead gorgeous goddess with the pouting lips, hourglass figure, and hip-swinging gait will endure in the memory until the end of time.

Her story, uncompromising at times, but recounted by the author without losing sight of a deep admiration for this unique, profoundly talented woman.

Brigitte Bardot was considerably more than a mere “sex kitten.”

After a dubious “couldn’t care less” debut which saw her acting in any kind of dross, as the roles got better so did she, developing into a consummate professional, believable and at times intensely moving in dramatic portrayals, and in lighter roles a fine comedienne with ability to put a song across, and an innate sense of timing.

Brigitte Bardot was never less than a remarkable, fearfully honest woman who observed of herself, later in life when her career was behind her and every comment she made was applauded or condemned, “I would rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.”

Asked to keep her opinions to herself, she told a reporter from Paris-Match, “I’ll only shut up when I’m in my casket!”