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The name Brigitte Bardot immediately conjures a sort of fetishised notion of femininity, as the actress who burst onto the scene in the mid-1950s teetered on the cusp of girlhood and womanhood, modernity and pre-modernity, emancipated and coquettish.
Bardot, born in Paris in 1932, died in St Tropez, where she had had a home since 1958, on Sunday. She was 91.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote of the then-actress, and later animal rights campaigner, in her 1959 essay Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, that "she is temperamental, changeable and unpredictable, and though she retains the limpidity of childhood, she has also preserved its mystery. A strange little creature, all in all."
De Beauvoir added that Bardot's image - which was simultaneously stylised and natural - "does not depart from the traditional myth of femininity. She appears as a force of nature, dangerous so long as she remains untamed, but it is up to the male to domesticate her. She is kind, she is good-hearted. In all her films she loves animals. If she ever makes anyone suffer, it is never deliberately."