Brigitte Bardot Dead at 91

Iconic French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died. She was 91.

Her animal rights organization, Fondation Brigitte Bardot, announced that she died at her home in Saint-Tropez, France, earlier today. A cause of death was not announced.

Deemed a “sex kitten” and the “sex goddess of cinema,” Bardot became an international icon in the 1950s at just 23 years old when the romantic drama film And God Created Woman released. Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said in 1959 that her brazenly erotic screen presence was a feminist response to “the tyranny of the patriarchal gaze” of the era, and France’s president Charles de Gaulle said at the time that she was “the French export as important as Renault cars.”

She worked with many of the most famous filmmakers of the era, including Jean-Luc Godard, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Louis Malle. After achieving international fame and renown, she retired from acting in 1973 to focus on her work as an advocate for animal rights, saying “I gave my beauty and my youth to men, and now I am giving my wisdom and experience, the best of me, to animals.”

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In her later years, she mostly made headlines for her bigoted views. She once stated that she thought of most homosexual men as people who “jiggle their bottoms, put their little fingers in the air and with their little castrato voices moan about what those ghastly heteros put them through,” expressed extreme dislike for both Jews and Muslims (calling the latter “cruel and barbaric invaders”), and said all actresses who claimed to have suffered sexual harassment on set were “hypocrites” and “ridiculous.”

Upon her death, famous figures all over the world paid tribute to her legacy—including France’s current president Emmanuel Macron, who described her as a “legend of the century.”

She is survived by her son, Nicolas.