Hounded by paparazzi, Bardot identified with the animals she later set out to save

Brigitte Bardot and her husband Gunter Sachs pose just before boarding a chartered airplane on their honeymoon in Las Vegas (July 14, 1966) [AP Photo]

Brigitte Bardot felt each pop of the flashbulb like the impact of a high-powered rifle bullet. And so it was, she said, that years of implacable hounding by the world’s paparazzi turned a woman idolized as a sultry sex kitten into a militant animal rights crusader.

Bardot, who died Sunday at age 91, was just 22 when she rocketed to international fame with the 1956 film sensation “And God Created Woman,” a cinematic ode to her hourglass figure, sultry pout and tousled blond mane.

Bardot would spend another decade and a half in the limelight — and among the paparazzi’s preferred prey, including just days before she gave birth — before she retired from the cinema to devote her life to protecting animals.

“I understand wild animals, under the fire of machine guns or hunters’ rifles, so well,” Bardot said in a 1982 interview. The paparazzi “didn’t shoot to kill, but they certainly killed something inside me by photographing me like that with their zoom lenses. They were like the arms of war, like bazookas.”

Bardot earned the title of one of the greatest sex symbols of the 20th century after her teenage breakthrough role dancing naked on tables in “And God Created Woman,” directed by the first of her four husbands, Roger Vadim.

At the height of her cinema career, Bardot came to symbolize a nation bursting the seams of bourgeois respectability. Her tousled, blond mane, fabulous figure and pouty irreverence were among France’s most visible natural assets. Air France, the state-run air carrier, once used Bardot in an advertising campaign.

Bardot’s second career as animal rights activist was equally sensational. She traveled to the Arctic to blow the whistle on the slaughter of baby seals; she condemned the use of animals in laboratory experiments; and she vigorously opposed Muslim sheep-slaughtering rituals.

“Man is an insatiable predator,” Bardot told The Associated Press on her 73rd birthday in 2007.

Her activism earned her compatriots’ respect and, in 1985, she was awarded the Legion of Honor. Later, however, she fell from public grace as her animal protection diatribes took on a decidedly extremist ring.

Her fourth husband was Bernard d’Ormale, a one-time adviser to far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, also repeatedly convicted of racism. Bardot denied being racist, but frequently decried the influx of immigrants into France, especially Muslims.

Bardot was born Sept. 28, 1934, to a wealthy industrialist, studied classical ballet and was discovered by a family friend who put her on the cover of Elle magazine at the age of 14. She said her father was a strict disciplinarian who would sometimes “punish me with a horse whip.”

It was French movie producer Vadim, whom she married in 1952, who saw her potential and wrote “And God Created Woman” to showcase her provocative sensuality, an explosive cocktail of childlike innocence and raw sexuality.

The film, which portrayed Bardot as a bored newlywed who beds her brother-in-law, had a decisive influence on New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, and it came to embody the hedonism and sexual freedom of the 1960s.

The film was a box-office hit and it made Bardot a superstar. ANGELA CHARLTON, PARIS, MDT/AP