Walking away / Brigitte Bardot's rejection of fame was her most radical act |
In 1956, Brigitte Bardot was invited to the Royal Command Film Performance in London, where she would be presented to Queen Elizabeth II. She was thrilled – not only to meet our queen, but the other one too: Marilyn Monroe would also be present.
Bardot later recalled the evening with a mixture of awe and amusement. Monroe, she insisted, was the real star: radiant, charming, fragile. This brief encounter between the two most famous blondes in cinema history captured, in miniature, a fork in the road between two kinds of fame.
Six years later, Monroe would be dead. She was found nude in her Los Angeles home, killed by a drug overdose, aged just 36. Even in death, her body was not left alone: a photograph was released to the press, as if the spectacle required one last offering. Bardot, by contrast, would live for nearly seven decades more. Monroe was absorbed entirely by the fame machine until it destroyed her. Bardot, improbably, would walk away.
Bardot never wanted to be admirable, she just wanted to be free
Bardot belonged to the first generation of truly global celebrities – recognisable across continents, relentlessly photographed, increasingly commodified – yet she lived in a world where fame still had edges. One could, with sufficient stubbornness, step outside it. She accepted obscurity as the price of survival.
By the time of that London evening, Bardot was already an icon. In the climactic scene of her 1956........