Cinema: Confessions of a Femme Fatale

At 48, La Bar dot strips away the legend

Bridgette Bardot has finally found it. Not the perfect man (Mon Dieu, c'est im possible!), but something else that has al ways eluded her: the perfect role. After purring and pouting her way through countless films as the sultry femme fatale who could resist anything but temptation, Bardot has turned herself into another French institution, the wise and slightly world-weary philosophe. Voila! At 48, the sex object has become an d'art.

Each Sunday night for the past three weeks, millions of French viewers have tuned in to a three-part, three-hour documentary in which Bardot bares herself for the first time while keeping her clothes on. Titled Brigitte Bardot Quelle Telle (As She Is), it splices together old photos, newsreel footage and film clips along with Bardot's own reminiscences and observations on the legend of B.B. In her finest performance, the woman of the world reveals an otherworldly quality of wistfulness and sadness.

Bardot recalls her early childhood as the proper jeune fille of an affluent father who once whipped her 50 times. ("I felt like a stranger in my parent's house. That's perhaps why I have had so many houses, houses I have bought myself, to feel at home.") It was Roger Vadim who first saw an international sex symbol in the guise of an ingenue of 15. He became her husband and Svengali. ("I was not used to such handsome men ... I was so shy, a little girl still. I wore white socks and a sophomoric white collar and tie.") In the film And God Created Woman (1956), which he co-wrote and directed, Vadim stripped her of her stockings and everything else, turning her into an international sensation. Over the next 17 years she was to make some 25 films and become France's most ogled export.

Bardot's public life merged with her private life. On-screen and off, she rebelled against straitlaced convention. Continually besieged by the press, she blames journalists for destroying her second marriage, to Actor Jacques Charrier. ("You have no idea of what it was like. We couldn't do anything. Everything was deformed and blown up out of proportion by the press.") The marriage produced Bardot's only child, Nicolas, now 22. But the role of mother proved impossible for her. ("I couldn't bring up Nicolas. I couldn't possibly have looked after a baby. I needed a mother. The mad existence I led, crying all the time.") Bardot's two great hates are photographers and the destruction of wildlife. She attributes her sympathy for the latter to her abhorrence of the former. ("I hate photographers. They don't allow us to live... That's why I can understand wild animals being pursued by men with rifles. Zoom lenses are like weapons.") Today, when she is not campaigning for baby seals, she divides her time between her Saint-Tropez villa and a farm just west of Paris.