When Vanity Fair spoke to the famously private Brigitte Bardot last year, the iconic beauty, although aging (as one does), seemed content sipping champagne from her secluded St. Tropez home and devoting herself to her long-time raison d’être, animal rights. Now, Jane Birkin, English actress and former Bardot co-star, has offered somewhat bleaker comments about the French actress’s present-day existence.
Birkin recently told The Daily Mail, “She still writes to me, because I give money to her dogs’ association.” Birkin, a friend of Bardot’s who starred alongside her in Bardot’s last film, Don Juan, reports that “[t]he postcards I get from her are always rather sad. I think she has difficulty walking.”
Birkin added, “Although she has a dubious private life with rather doubtful characters, she’s made people have a sort of moral conscience. People consider her as being animal-mad because human beings have been so disappointing to her, which I think is true. She was so beautiful that people were envious of her.”
The Daily Mailattempts to position the comments in some sort of passive-aggressive aging-cat fight between the two women by explaining that Bardot’s “once-smooth complexion has been wrinkled by years of sun exposure” while Birkin remains “still youthful-looking,” and noting that both stars romanced Serge Gainsbourg in the late 60s.
However, it seems as though Birkin was simply trying to explain Bardot’s singular experience, growing up as a 60s sex symbol. Sharing an anecdote from a film in which they co-starred, Birkin said, “In a scene when we came out of a car, she’d been crying, so she had a slightly red face and people were delighted. They were cruel to her because she was dangerous and could have nicked their husbands.”
Related:Brigitte Bardot Speaks! Talking Frankly with the Toast of St. Tropez
