London - She was the screen sex symbol of her age, admired and desired by men everywhere.
Yet Brigitte Bardot had a deeply troubled private life, was plagued by depression and tried to commit suicide at least four times, a new biography claims.
The French actress, who turned 80 last month, has boasted of 100 lovers – including women.
In Brigitte Bardot: The Life, The Legend, The Movies, author Ginette Vincendeau details a love life that more than lived up to her steamy screen roles. It was also one in which Bardot was usually in the driving seat.
Miss Vincendeau, professor of film studies at King’s College, London, describes how Bardot, daughter of a wealthy Parisian family, was a 16-year-old model when she met first husband Roger Vadim.
He had been sent to see if Bardot was suitable for a film role. She didn’t get the job but the pair fell in love.
Her horrified parents threatened to send her away and allowed them continue to see each other only so long as they did not marry until she was 18, says Miss Vincendeau. Bardot reacted badly, turning on a gas oven and sticking her head inside. However, her parents came home in time to save her.
Bardot later dumped Vadim for actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, only to leave him for singer Gilbert Becaud and reportedly attempted suicide again in 1958 while making the film Love Is My Profession.
Jacques Charrier, Bardot’s co-star in 1959’s Babette Goes To War, became her second husband and the father of her child.
But she did not want the baby, Nicolas, born in 1960.
On her 26th birthday that year, she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and slit her wrists at her villa in Nice.
As her film career reached its apogee in the 1960s, the stream of men through her life turned into a torrent. But as affair followed affair, it was always Bardot who called time on a relationship, Miss Vincendeau says.
Some screen sirens are chiefly remembered as vulnerable victims of predatory men but Bardot did not fall into that category. Miss Vincendeau quotes French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir, who said of Bardot: “In the game of love, she is as much a hunter as she is prey”. - Daily Mail