Screen legend Brigitte Bardot backed French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in a handwritten note published Wednesday in regional daily Nice-Matin.
Bardot truly is someone who fits the adage "beauty is only skin deep." I think of her early movie career back in the fifties when she was one of the world's great beauties. You don't have to be a man or a lesbian to note the obvious. I would be a liar if I said she wasn't. She was everything I never was and never could be because my genetics were and are so shitty. Nobody ever took a worse picture than me once I attained adulthood. Bardot, on the other hand, was blessed. In her teens and early twenties she was a natural beauty with a near-perfect body in the years before anorexic figures became all the rage. Without trying to sound sexist, not long after Bardot became famous, she partied too much, smoked too much, went out in the sun too much, and by the age of thirty, her looks had hardened. There were a few suicide attempts along the way, which didn't help matters. She more than anyone knew she couldn't go on being some kind of sex symbol, so she quit the movies before she hit forty. She wanted to devote her life to saving animals although "animal rights" has nothing to do with "animal welfare." In any case, some people admired her for her dedication to this cause while others like yours truly regarded "animal rights activists" as hardcore nutters.
Little did the public know Bardot, while once beautiful on the outside, always harbored ugliness on the inside, but over the years it gradually came out with her support of far right extremist politicians. She was unabashedly bigoted in her attitudes toward Muslims and other groups and got herself into legal trouble for publicly spewing these attitudes in print. She's around 78 now. When she dies a few people might remember her as a "sex kitten," but I suspect many more are going to remember her as the French version of David Duke.
Bardot's a tragic figure indeed.
